You need something vibrant yet compelling to kick-start a career in poetry, and with Lisa Glatt’s debut book, she has done just that. If you know Glatt pretty well, Monsters and Other Lovers will scare you; if you don’t know Glatt at all, the book will still scare you.
Published in 1996 and written over a period of many years before that, Glatt writes about what she knows and has experienced, albeit sad and horrifying in a mundane sort of way, it remains true and real. Split into four parts that loosely tie in with significant changes in her life – her mother’s breast cancer, Glatt’s own accident as a young girl, her move to 69 Rose Street. She even has some advice for impoverished writers with “I am Weird to the New Boys”: When you write for a living/and no one buys your words/canned food grows appetizing.”
Glatt is a fresh voice in this turbulent world of anger and pain, and she reminds us that even though life may be going to hell in a hand basket, there is still hope.
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Originally published on February 28th 2002.
Originally published in the Long Beach Union.