Description
Sideris carries us through grief, memory, family, and the pandemic. These poems, some originally jotted on paper napkins, show us ourselves, in our absurdity, our generosity, and our legacy.
Written during the pandemic in the working class, immigrant neighborhood of Kensington, Brooklyn, LIBERTY LAUNDRY is a book about freedom, work, grief, love, and the civic and familial divisions and estrangements that have deepened with each new variant of the virus.
"'My daughter cuts my damaged/ends in the garden behind/her father’s house where,/per his orders, I am not welcome—' Hilary Sideris’ poems flash forward at lightning speed. Before you can blink, there’s a back story, details become volatile, and we’re catapulted into unfathomable history. The Q train goes express, a plague strikes. The America of 'foaming root beer/in thick glass mugs' confronts active shooter drills. A 'BLT’s pale tomato” implies a vast system of servitude. Always, language is a bridge and a wall. Always, events elude the stories we shelter in. Jaime Sabines wrote, 'everything happens in silence/the way light is made in the eye;' Sideris can access that inscrutability of experience, how we know ourselves only through clues and only in retrospect. LIBERTY LAUNDRY is a book of gorgeous immediacy and depth." —D. Nurkse
Poetry.
Author Bio
Hilary Sideris is the author of Most Likely to Die (Poets Wear Prada 2014), The Inclination to Make Waves (Big Wonderful 2016), Un Amore Veloce (Kelsay Books 2019), THE SILENT B (Dos Madres Press, 2019), and ANIMALS IN ENGLISH (Dos Madres Press, 2020). She has a BA in English literature from Indiana University and an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. Sideris works as a professional developer for The City University of New York's CUNY Start program and lives in Brooklyn.
Author City: BROOKLYN, NY USA