Losing the Ring in the River
Spare and incisive, the poems in Losing the Ring in the River deal with three strong women—Clara, Emma, and Liz, women who are tough, often sassy, and have dreams that aren’t quelled by the realities they face. Saiser deftly explores the undercurrents connecting three generations and is at her most powerful when she explores how lives are restricted and sometimes painfully damaged by what people cannot or will not share with one another. Saiser’s poetry is as harsh as it is beautiful; she avoids resolutions and easy endings, focusing instead on the small, hard-won victories that each woman experiences in her life and in her love of those around her.
Losing the Ring in the River is more than a collection of poems—it is a novel, a history, a family memoir in poetic form, a grand moving story built of poems and joined with the intricacy of a spider’s web. Saiser depicts three generations, Clara, Emma, and Liz, and in so doing she makes this experience part of our heritage and our collective mythology.
I love how the voice in each section makes you feel differently toward each speaker, characters whose worlds you watch through their eyes and, at the end, leave you wanting to hear what comes next.
Poet Marge Saiser . . . brings us the stories of three generations of western women. As always, Saiser's poems are forthright as well as lovely. As each generation here encounters the challenges of her life . . . she must accept life as an opportunity to attain freedom. Life in the natural world is hard but generative. Life prevails, as it must. Readers will rejoice, as they must.'--Hilda Raz, Mary Burritt Christiansen poetry series editor
Marge Saiser’s poems reveal our inner lives, wide open as fields and prairie, filled with broken dreams, with wildness, with poignant restraint. They honor indomitable women who won’t give up on imagination or on life.
With details of remarkable grit and with acknowledgment of the importance of story to our lives, the connections between the women in this family unfold.
Marge Saiser is the author of five books, including Lost in Seward County, Beside You at the Stoplight, and Bones of a Very Fine Hand. Her honors include an Academy of American Poets Prize and several Nebraska Book Awards. In 2009 Saiser was named Distinguished Artist in Poetry by the Nebraska Arts Council. Her poems have been published in Prairie Schooner, Chattahoochee Review, Field, and other journals.
