Review of Stealing Flowers from the Neighbors by Sherri Levine

STEALING FLOWERS FROM THE NEIGHBORS, Sherri Levine, Kelsay Books, 502 South East A-119, American Fork, UT 84003, 2021, 85 pages, paper, Kelsaybooks.com.

Starting with Sherri Levine’s poetry book title, Stealing Flowers from the Neighbors, readers may wonder who stole the neighbors’ blooms and why. The title poem provides answers. The distraught poet is rushing to bring flowers to her ailing mother in hospice care. The devoted daughter is frantic to arrive in time to offer whatever beauty she can to her mom before it’s too late. She tells us: I slide behind bushes, pricked by brambles, yank and snap, rip and tear… I could only think of you in your hospice bed / your weary head / waiting for me to appear.

The impressionist oil painting “Trio of Roses” by Kay Levine on the book’s cover is also an homage honoring the loving connection between the gifted poet, Sherri Levine, and her talented mother.

The book is divided into two sections. The first two thirds, titled “Girl,” recall a rocky childhood and adolescence. The poems unveil a girl’s vulnerability and confusion as she rides an emotional roller coaster of insult and yearning, love and loss, safety and danger. Immediately following “Girl,” sibilant sounds scare the poet and her sister. When dishes smacked against / kitchen walls and blinds slammed shut/we knew we had to go somewhere we could not know. (“The Brightest Stars”).

The tastes of Sunday breakfasts include the sweetness of maple syrup, challah, tainted by sour milk. The last line of the poem “Sunday Mornings” offers a heartfelt and heart-breaking wish from the girl: If only I had a stick of peppermint gum, everything would be a lot better. The voice of the child is so wistful, but the reader understands that chewing a piece of sugary gum will not do enough to better the bitter flavor of this child’s early life.

She is at risk. In Levine’s poem “Facedown,” the 2019 winner of the CALYX Press Lois Cranston Memorial Prize, the first three lines, offered with surgical precision, cut to the quick: He untucks his shirt / pulls down his zipper / pushes my head on his lap. The male’s actions confront the reader with a terrifying situation of sexual child abuse. His penis in her mind is a monster sea worm, undulating. The innocent victim is pressed down by his football hands. Unfortunately, slick monsters like this male exist, rampant in real life. Like the speaker of this poem, vast numbers of innocent victims disassociate from abuse and/or are too ashamed and/or afraid to tell anyone what was done to her. This poem strikes me as brilliantly written, painful, and fearless.

Warnings are issued by strong women in the girl’s family. Her Aunt Sylvia calls the teenage niece Sweetheart, and warns her, Boys won’t want you if you’re too easy. (“Aunt Sylvia’s Eyebrows”). The poet is rebuffed, but she does avoid an assault. Chuckie “Cheese” Henderson dumps the poet because she will not lie with him on crusty snow and let him grope her under her thermals. What a relief that she stops him. The girl worries it’s the end of the world because a boy, seeing her armpit hair, screams, Ew! But her Aunt Harriet, putting her arm around my shoulder, softly said, ‘Honey, some day you will look back, and these people won’t mean anything.’(“End of the World”).

Sherri Levine has also been a strong supporter of women writers as an editor of VoiceCatcher. She leads the Head for the Hills poetry reading series and is a teacher of English as a Second Language. My favorite poem of hers, “Grammar Lessons,” combines a deft use of verb terminology with examples of tension in a marriage that leads to divorce. The poem comes across to me as sardonic humor—witty yet sorrowful. I admire, too, how the narrator of the poem is taking on agency. She is divorcing him. I especially love the double entendre of the last line: Love is full of tenses. Readers will enjoy the way the grammar combines with the teacher’s experience and the end of a marriage.

When my students ask me how to use the future tense,
I tell them we use will for a promise or a threat.

Later in the poem,

When they ask about the simple past,
He loved me a long time ago…
It’s not that simple, I tell them.
There’s certainly nothing perfect about the present perfect

As a teacher of students from many countries and nationalities, it follows that Levine’s book also showcases poems that weave in history and cross-cultural experiences. Her Jewish grandmother and grandfather share various aspects of their lives in different poetic forms. In the prose poem, “The Greatest Jewish Cowboy,” Grandpa Morris rides in carrying his itchy wool coat, too warm for his granddaughter. But she doesn’t complain and listens to his whispered battles against the bad guys—the Nazis.

I imagined my grandfather in his cowboy hat and snakeskin
boots riding his horse through the desert, shooting at
scorpions, spiders, and rattlesnakes, calling out yee-haw. I
listened to his voice echo through the canyon while
lightning split open the sky.

Levine’s grandmother, a yenta, gossips with her friends on the phone while she’s hunching over soup in a house that (reeks of garlic, paprika… parsley and parnips). Levine’s superb use of sensory details brings the “Hothouse” to sweaty life. Her use of color lets the reader see this grandmother so clearly:

She’s four and a half feet tall,
silver poufy hair,
lipstick the color of eggplant.
In her lavender house robe  

The second section of the book “Unleashed” includes poems honoring her mother, Kay Levine: feeding her, taking care of the many actions the daughter must take, holding her mother close, grieving her loss.

Thinking of you, Mom
is like trying to
rescue a snowflake
from the palm of my glove. (“Frostbitten”)

If only the daughter could save her beloved mother from dying. Instead Levine is sitting shiva (“Sitting Shiva on Custer Park Hill”) on the bench she and her mother shared the year before.

She handed me sliced apples
Smeared in honey,
“May we have a happy and healthy
New Year, she said…
…
now she is more beautiful to me
in my memories of her.

Sounds of the poet’s sorrow crumble, crunch, kick and whack, yank, and snap. (“Weeding”) Alas, she bemoans, “Lately, I’ve been forgetting small things, even her voice is starting to fade…) The book ends in “One Life,” a songlike poem that keeps echoing the word without. I admire how Sherri Levine opens her heart throughout this book, ending with a dozen poems that lovingly memorialize her mother. Stealing Flowers from the Neighbors presents touching poems to read again and again.