Ooo goodie, a new book! Whoa, wow. Raw new book. Aloud says New York City don't play. The Lower East Side ain't nothin to sniff at, no sugar to coat shit 'round here. There is, however, beauty. In honesty insistent on survival, deliverance from invisibility, reprieve from pain. The Nuyorican Poets Cafe seems a stage for many stories, united in determination to find voice. Poetry is greater for the effort. The family is stronger.

The two poets assigned this week grew from starkly different familial experience. Reading these poems we are forced to acknowledge the spectrum of meaning in "family." In doing so we have to ponder the source of the bond, however warped or adorned. I surely do not have an answer. It is striking that the same word applies to a connection that defies death as well as what requires death for re-connection.

Sapphire's poem, "In My Father's House," sneaks up on you burns itself behind your eyes. Ever after, you will see a face every time you look on violence. You can not be apathetic to the weight people walk around with; masks are stripped. The poem demands compassion, and not pity, for the tied-on but unknown, the secret pain. She begins the poem "together alone," giving a clue to the framework of the story that's coming, though not the depth of the pain she will reveal. With those two words, we know things are not well at home. But like many homes, which are perfect? She tricks us into camaraderie.

She presents her father's living room with the outsider's view. We enter the poem in the way the father wants to be seen - prideful, patriotic, maybe even honorable, as he stands to salute the flag. They are connected only by proximity in this stanza, though a tenderness (and maybe habit?) from the daughter/narrator/poet comes through as she calls him, "Daddy." We may be used to the stories of father's disappearing; in Sapphire's poem, the mother does. Here we think we've found the weakness, the reason for dysfunction, because the family scatters after her. "We rolled loose to corners of the room."

She begins an interesting play with language at this point in the poem. Here, and at three more points, the language shifts from concrete, physical, present, to pure metaphor. From the physical scene presented in the first stanza and a half, she shifts to, "buttoned in cold; bones of children knitting shadows in the dark." Sharp difference in word choice, tone, presentation. It startled me at first, thought maybe it was a fluke. Then in a few lines she switched back: "he told me his father put his foot on his neck." She's back to metaphor by, "Aries full of blind light," then back to physical by the time she describes her father fashioning a rubber hose weapon to beat her with. These shifts happen in the space of nine lines. The shifts are mental, representing the inner world of an abused poet fighting for recognition among physical truth and facade. A fissure in personality, a branching, the compartmentalizing the mind employs to survive.

The rest of poem 1 in the series is heavy. More heavy than I'd like to repeat. Maybe that's cowardice, but I'm not afraid to admit it. Those two tough stanzas do better than anything I can think of to relate expressions of violence, how it travels through a person, the different forms it can take. How children are often subjects of their parents, and how deeply violence is implanted for children who are subject to it. Family is a power structure, with children at the bottom. No matter how this structure and the beings in it are abused, children retain a longing for affection they do not receive. How do they know? What is this bond that, even when dishonored, still sings?

Once the secret is told, metaphor sinks to the background, becomes the framework of the poem rather than the siding. The poet stays within concrete language and physical imagery throughout the rest of the series. Perhaps the fissure is healed once she has remembered, written it down, spoken. Gave up the pain to the power of the stage, removing the power of the secret.

She doesn't stop speaking about family though. She stays with the examination of the nonsensical bond, shows the damage it has undergone, and yet it remains. After revealing that her father has raped her (hard to believe it can be said in more horrific fashion), she shows the complications of familial bond in her endearment of her father: "send me / some avocadoes / from the tree, Daddy." Stark exposure on the backdrop of so much pain. This thing that is family is not easily broken, even when it is broken. At the end of 4, she "disappeared, / like the truth / like the tree." This seems so different from the girl who beats a cat in the first poem, not knowing where the rage comes from. She is not subjugated, she is violator. But here too is the complication of family, the battling undercurrents of reciprocity and recognition inseparable as drops of wave.