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Marjie Giffin’s chapbook debut, Touring, traverses the landscape of America, family, and social inequities with observant detail. An encounter with a homeless woman on the steps of a Milwaukee church is just as thought-provoking as the poet’s recollection of stepping past shivering homeless persons on the periphery of Harvard. Poignant reflections emerge from both a dusty drive through a ghostly Southwestern village and a middle-aged dip into a pristine Northern lake. A sense of others’ entitlement arises when the poet faces restrictions against viewing a New England landscape in Dead End.
Long-ago love is experienced anew in Back in ‘73 and heartbreak recounted in The Potted Plant.
A doting mother and grandmother, Giffin writes with obvious devotion to her offspring in poems like A Place of Peace and Grandbaby. Sardonic humor flourishes in her retelling of traveling with adult offspring in Backseat Rider, while the joy of road-tripping with friends is apparent in Girls Trip.
The title poem, Touring, takes a step back in time to a favorite card game of Giffin’s father, while the collection’s ending poem, Empty City, recreates the eerily quiet atmosphere caused by today’s very real experience, the Coronavirus.
Poems from Giffin’s chapbook have also appeared in Blue Heron Review; Flying Island; Poetry Quarterly; Northwest Indiana Literary Journal; Snapdragon: A Journal of Art and Healing; So It Goes: The Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library, Nos. 6 and 7; St. Katherine Review; The Lives We Live(d) In: An Anthology of Poems about Social Justice; and Tipton Poetry Journal.
