Malinowski delivers precise images, both disturbing and intimate, yet she keeps us at arm's length as the voice of the narrator is handed over to various speakers from the past. We have the limp noodles of the grandmother, the dust-covered piano of the grandfather. But it's the cracked and bent trees, the "cut off stumps" that halt our breathing. Family and strangers are lost to the past, the Ashkenazi Jewish world stamped out by Hitler. She even finds a way of addressing personal guilt. We are left with a unique collective experience, as we too, are erased.
-Laurel Benjamin, FLOWERS ON A TRAIN
This is a story told in flashes, as though by the pulsing lights of an ambulance, of bombs and rockets exploding, of interrupted memories. Each flash, each isolated memory matters because distance lets us supply the connections. This is the voice of someone on the outside who is searching for a way to understand. Each poem documents an absence - of information, of a person or creature, of common language, of comprehension - and each hole implies the weave of the context. Each poem about each memory is a visceral blow, as it should be. I could say that Malinowski has worked through these events so that you don't have to, but that would not be true. Malinowski has worked through them because we need to know why and how war matters.
-Karen Greenbaum-Maya, The Book of Knots and Their Untying
Kim Malinowski's Reverberations is a conversation with the past told in a chorus of voices. Soldiers, victims, survivors, and historians all take their turn painting their version of truth. From Provenance:
"The taste of blood and dirt caked sweat of war putting layers upon layers on forgetting is too easy."
Yet you may find forgetting these poems is not so easy. The collection is a song of conflict and survival that will echo long after you've turned the last page.
-Gabby Gilliam, No Ocean Spit Me Out
