THE FAMILY PLOT: Poems

Backroom Window Press, 2022

In this, her first full-length collection of poems, Linda McCauley Freeman tells the story of an American girlhood spent in a large and boisterous family that is sometimes dysfunctional, sometimes dangerous. The Family Plot is part memoir, part survival history, with plenty of space for a heroic portrait of the materfamilias, described in the title of one poem as “My Italian Catholic Human Rights Commissioner Mother” who even as she descends into dementia rises mightily from her chair. Rises mightily, one might add, in these poems as one focus of meaning amidst this rich complexity of personality over which the poet’s keen intelligence broods with an objectivity not devoid of kindness and deep affection. “I will remind her who she is/every time she forgets,” McCauley Freeman writes, and again, “It’s not that I can’t remember/her face, a kaleidoscope/of pictures. . . .”