MAPMAKER OF ABSENCES

Poetry. "The world is full of things unbecoming themselves," writes Maria M. Benet in Mapmaker of Absences. The poems in this collection chart more than subtractions and absences. They recover scenes of a childhood in Eastern Europe and contemporary life in California; they record the unraveling of preconceptions natural, marital, and familial; they remind us of the intensity of small moments brought into consciousness. "Maria M. Benet is a literary cartographer of memory, of a past dense with meanings that need to be deciphered, of longing, nostalgia, and loss. She has found a way to map the interiors, and she does so with insight, sympathy, and imagination"--Edward Hirsch.