Making the Skeleton Dance (The Braziller Series of Poetry)

A courageous work--poetically, personally, and historically--Making the Skeleton Dance chronicles the disintegration of the author's family under the insidious influence of a family secret. At the heart of this secret is Dutch Schultz, the notorious 1930s New York mobster and Bronx Beer Baron of the prohibition era. Looking back now as an adult, the poet asks the searching, defiant questions of a grown child determined to unravel the family secret that is never discussed but always undeniably present. Seamlessly blending poetry with brief transcriptions of recorded conversations between the author and her mother, Making the Skeleton Dance captures the raw emotion of this wrenching psychological drama with language that is searingly honest. Her relentless search for the truth unearths another, deeper secret--one that she had hidden even from herself.