Heartfelt stories-remembered and re-visioned-are at the center of Family Matters, a collection of poems by Anne Mulvey. Many chronicle vivid childhood experiences growing upin Indiana in a large Irish-Catholic family. Childhood awareness of contradictions and complexities associated with gender, race, and class evolve over time. Understandings of family and of home broaden and deepen. Several poems grapple with loss, death, and their consequences for individual family members and the family as a whole. Through the lens of the author, stories and reflections explore large and small changes and related emotions: longing and loving, empathy and anger, grief and joy. The poems in Family Matters cover a lot of ground. This is a lifelong journey you won’t want to miss! Family Matters is a loving but unsentimental view of family life (and death), complete with near universal traits families exhibit. These poems, shapely and musical in their use of free verse and a variety of forms, serve up a feast of empathy, the easy stretching of family bonds to include ‘others, ’ and the unforced sharing of both the expected and the harrowing. Rhina P. Espaillat, Bilingual Poet, Essayist, Short Story Writer, Translator Anne Mulvey’s poems reveal her tender, cheeky, soulful life. As a reader, I’m drawn into what really matters and graced by her memorable images and wisdom. Cynthia Winton-Henry, InterPlay Cofounder Anne Mulvey has long been revered among community psychologists as a feminist icon whose work embodies the mantra ‘the personal is political.’ Now her rich collection of poems reminds us in turn that the political can be deeply personal. Spanning a lifetime of keen observation infused with human feeling, here is family, grief, injustice, disappointment, laughter, rage, a beloved brother lost, and finally hope. Heather Grindley, Feminist Community PsychologistVictoria University, Melbourne, Australia
