Poetry by Lisa Grunberger, reviewed by Angelina Sciolla
FOR THE FUTURE OF GIRLS (Kelsay Books)

Think about the first time you ran your hands over a relief map or globe—likely as a child in elementary school—and consider how your palms encountered and then anticipated the textures, curves, and grooves over stretches of geography. You moved across a world you wanted to discover and always remember because of how it took shape in your hands. 

That kind of textured evocation is how I found myself experiencing For the Future of Girls, the latest poetry collection from Lisa Grunberger, an English professor at Temple University, playwright, and Pushcart-nominated poet who has several previous collections, including I Am Dirty (Moonstone, 2019) and Born Knowing (Finishing Line Press, 2012). 

The substantive volume is organized into four sections that constitute “epochs” marking the poet’s journey as an American-born child of Holocaust survivors. Raised in Long Island by her adoptive Jewish immigrant parents, Grunberger artfully and urgently reconstructs a complicated, rich, and precarious family history, so that its relevance may be understood by a generation for whom history competes with the mercenary churn of the present.

Throughout the collection, the poet unearths the artifacts of her life, then assembling them like a puzzle she lives to solve. Eating cherries with her clockmaker father, ruminating on her mother’s pink slippers, or seeing her grandmother’s face “wet with Hitler’s sweat”—these are pieces that insist on being preserved for their illustrative and spiritual power. Incisive and poignant, Grunberger’s writing summons the quotidian to deliver the weight of the world. In “Yellow” she writes:

Shipped between statue and shadow
My father bites into a rotten onion
The soot of Berlin’s synagogues clings to his shirt

With their grim beauty, these passages mingle with a range of pieces infused with wit and longing to unveil a woman discovering who she is, both within and outside of the world she transcribes. As the book’s title suggests, this collection builds a narrative arc among women. Grunberger is writing about (and to) her mother, her daughter, and herself, ensuring that the inheritances of history, legacy, and identity are carried forward into the future. This is most evident in the collection’s opening piece,  “Genesis: Beginning the In”:

Now I will relive my mother
Backwards, read her life
from back to front
from the moment she breathed
her last breath in my arms

By the time I’m done
a new story will birth
between my legs, a new letter will be open

Three generations embodied in a few brief lines lead the way into the poet’s journey—a transmission of histories that strain to be heard. The artist is the steward of memory, and throughout, Lisa Grunberger is both steward and explorer, enticing us with the pleasures of the ordinary and capturing us with their immense subtext. In the last poem, entitled “Human Race,” the first line reads as a caution. “You cannot control what you will remember.” This is inevitably true. But, for the future of girls, we must try.

Angelina Sciolla is a writer and creative professional with over 20 years of experience across disciplines in marketing communications, journalism, and performing arts. Her articles, reviews, and fiction have appeared in Publishers Weekly, The Philadelphia Inquirer, SOMA, City Paper, Philadelphia Style Magazine, Home and Garden, Bucks County Magazine, Cleaver and The Bucks County Writer. She is currently completing an MA in Comparative Religious Studies at Regis University.

Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Book Reviews.