Where We Grew Up by Jennifer Lagier
Small Poetry Press, P.O. Box 5324, Concord, CA 94524
Tel. 925.798.1411
Reviewed by Mary Barnet

“Where We Grew Up,” a marvelous night-time terror poem in Jennifer Lagier’s book by the same name, is aptly the centerpiece of her book. In it, we get to know her childhood years and the sources of her personality as, she states in “Sainthood”:

                                        “I tell them saints broken
                                          by torture were my
                                          Catholic role models.” 

“Ripe for the Picking” is a poem about dioxon spray on crops. The canneries are among other topics and all express a political awareness of her everyday life.  Poor children die in “The Big Burn” when housed without electricity. Lagier’s poems about her “mastectomy” are straightforward and touching.  

“The Earnest Work” is a beautiful final poem. But what the poem, The Earnest Work make up in an elegant description of Nature, the first part of Jennifer Lagier’s Where We Grew Up gives us in caustic beauty.

 As Ruth Daigon notes so succinctly in her cover notes: “She has chronicled and processed the events that moved her from the child to the mature, conscientious and politicized woman.” Her poetry is indeed “honest and filled with compassion.”