The Kingdom Where Everybody Sings Off Key

Remarkable, really, the way in The Kingdom Where Everybody Sings Off Key Helen Ruggieri moves from her life's early music when she was a teen angel with a Jersey Girl's desires, when in the dark of a car her angora sweater "electrified itself" as it slipped over her hair & when, somewhere, it was always 1955 with Little Richard & Elvis & doo-wop ? to, for example, the mature & spiritual reconciliations with the past that we hear in her penultimate poem in which she realizes "the larger rhythms rocking us" & embraces/makes a part of her being that "cepuscular kingdom / where no one keeps time." Yearning & yearning for the past subside, & the poet stands whole, in an off-key but deeply human twilight of poetry & deep understanding. This is a hard-earned, wonderful book. ~ William Heyen