Daphne and Her Discontents
by Jane Rosenberg LaForge

Description

A significant volume of poems exploring self through the Classic myths, transferring to poetry the power to transform.  Per Robbi Nester:  “By giving her family saga this form, the poet subverts a classic tale of women’s powerlessness to one of witness.”  (Cover image by Leslie Allyn.)

Excerpt from “Explaining the Holocaust to My Daughter”

“The thing that has nothing to do with me yet …A floating border of breaths/gambled over a gravel limit,/the stones that became risk/adverse and bruise-sensitive./Or like the poppy seeds my daughter loved to pour/into lemon batter to be made/solid between the dainty ridges./Like babies, she said/in her voice of no consequence/Like babies.”

See an interview with Jane here:  http://www.matadorreview.com/blog-url/2018/4/18/within-the-familiar-a-conversation-with-jane-rosenberg-laforge

Comments:

“….In Daphne and Her Discontents, Jane Rosenberg LaForge explores the Daphne myth as metaphor to “explain” herself, but recognizes, like many of us, “…I remain insoluble to myself.” In finely detailed language she describes a difficult childhood: her mother’s mental illness, a dominating and changeable father, and her own painful confusion: “Are we a happy family, I asked my father/Yes, he said. Yes.”  The imprisonment/saving of Daphne as tree resonates with personal, family, and even cultural history which still informs and constrains the present; in the moving “Explaining the Holocaust to My Daughter”: “The thing that has nothing to do with me yet …A floating border of breaths/gambled over a gravel limit,/the stones that became risk/adverse and bruise-sensitive./Or like the poppy seeds my daughter loved to pour/into lemon batter to be made/solid between the dainty ridges./Like babies, she said/in her voice of no consequence/Like babies.” (Carol Ciavonne, essayist, poet and author of Azimuth; co-author of Birdhouse Dialogues; winner of the Littoral Press Poetry Prize 2016; and associate editor, Posit literary journal.)

“….As Jane Rosenberg LaForge notes in this marvelous new collection of poems, Daphne—the myth she has chosen to explain herself—as “example and evidence … although not of what you’re thinking.” In fact to experience this book is to bear witness to a marvel of myth-remaking, an exploration of allegory and the implications of transmogrification that will stay with you for along time. There’s an abundance of unexpected twists and turns, multiplicities of direction, and an often delicious recasting of roles and relationships to be found here. Simultaneously, there’s a certain wry iconoclasm at work—particularly in the recurring reference to Christmas trees, and the tentative relationship between her family’s Jewish heritage and the wider Christian society in which they find themselves. Welcome to the world of Jane Rosenberg LaForge, an acquaintanceship with the mythic in the mundane; its diminution into shadow; and quite possibly, a way out of that shadow and back into the light. (George Wallace, poet and writer in residence at the Walt Whitman Birthplace; author of Smashing Rock and Straight as Razors,Winner of the 2017 Blue Light Press Award, and 30 chapbooks.)

“….Poetry offers the power to transform the prosaic stuff of one’s personal past to myth and legend. In Jane Rosenberg La Forge’s book, Daphne and Her Discontents, she reframes her past as the family tree, Daphne, daughter of a minor river god, transformed by her father so that she may escape the ardent advances of Apollo. By giving her family saga this form, the poet subverts a classic tale of women’s powerlessness to one of witness. In this telling, this writer speaks both for herself and for centuries of other women, revealing that the myth as we know it was false: the transformation was actually an act of punishment rather than mercy. Daphne has been “petrified in limb/and intelligence” (“In the Petrified Forest”) by a father who wishes to silence her, to deny her sexuality, and thus to keep her from “the untidy dissolution we are all born with.” These poems call on us to recognize that the poet and her sisters as well are “still human/beneath this bark/and decoration” (“In the Desert”). (Robbi Nester, poet and author of Other-Wise, A Likely Story and Balance; editor of The Liberal Made Me Do It poetry anthology.)