Brooklyn Accent
BROOKLYN ACCENT
by Claudia Drosen
In her book Brooklyn Accent, Claudia Drosen takes us from early years in her Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn to far more recent years in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where snow accumulates “like lace and popcorn.” Best of all, she journeys to the interior, as all great poets do, touching the raw nerve of longing. At the heart of this book is the poet’s desire for attention from her father and mother, professional musicians (violist and pianist, respectively), who spend their lives rehearsing in the living room by day and concertizing by night. Professional flutist herself, who once studied with Jean-Pierre Rampal in France, Claudia Drosen details, for example, how she, with monomaniacal dedication, approached George Gershwin’s Original Songbook for Piano, a gift from her father from his early years at Juilliard. “She played it over and over, performing for him, even when he was gone, pouring [her] love for him through the sounding board of the old upright.” This writer dazzles, eliciting chuckles with a sense of humor all her own and effecting such sad takings-in of breath that, by book’s end, the reader is changed, grateful for the unbridling. Bravo, Claudia Drosen!
U.P. Poet Laureate Beverly Matherne, author of Love Poems, Teas, Incantations
Claudia Drosen’s poems make magnificent company. Like a blazingly articulate, unpretentious buddy with whom you love to linger over coffee half the day, her Brooklyn Accent turns insightful to fun, honest to wry, as she speaks in irresistible and convincing character one minute, in deep and personal confidence the next. I’ve been looking forward to this book for years.
Jonathan Johnson, author of May Is an Island
In Brooklyn Accent a man in a “sofa-sized oil painting” extends his hand in welcoming you to join him on the wall. Perhaps it’s a character in a Kafka story who has been painted alive in Claudia Drosen’s poem “What the Night Can Do.” Or Edward Hopper in a more surreal American painting of night life. She belongs in a Brooklyn poetry shop where the Feigenbaums buy books, but inhabits the Queen City of a far northern clime. Her red plaid sneakers of childhood are magic shoes that transport her back to her bobby sock days of Brooklyn. Her dream world includes the interior of Kimmelman’s Funeral Home. She would enter that dream finally to witness her Uncle Louie in a casket. She didn’t cry. In “Mall Moon” it could have been Charles Simic staring up at the sky at this hastily constructed Scotch-taped bit of the starry night. Maybe this is my favorite poem of Drosen’s collection of oddities. But there are many more. Each one is like tasting “the first burst of/chocolate on your tongue.” You are having this sugar buzz, and then you turn the page to another poem of hers with a “stark rectangle of light.” Here is Edward Hopper again, and what does he have to say to Madame Drosen?
Russell Thorburn, author of Let It Be Told in a Single Breath
To spend time with Claudia Drosen’s Brooklyn Accent is like being fondued in mishegoss and wonder. Each poem is a morsel dripping with Coney Island “Nostril People” and “parenthetical intrusion,” topped with “sips of our (no whip) mochaccinos.” There’s music. Plaid sneakers. A hamster named Zeke. Fingers that “smell like salami.” This book keeps you coming back for another bite. And another. And another. You’ll finish reading the last poem and then return to the head of the table for second and third helpings. Claudia Drosen is simply a poet who leaves you hungry for more. Bon appétit!
Martin Achatz, author of A Bigfoot Bestiary and Other Wonders