Phoenix Poets: To Forget Venice (Paperback)

In “To Forget Venice,” Peg Boyers sets for herself and the reader a most improbable challenge. Venice is the site of several unforgettable years of her own adolescence, and remains the city she returns to year after year. It is also a place that is both adored and reviled by the speakers in this various and unconventionally polyphonic book of poems. Throughout the book, the voices we hear belong not only to imagined characters from literature, like the mother of Tadzio (from “Death in Venice”), or the companion of Vladimir Illych Lenin, or the Victorian prophet John Ruskin and his wife Effie, but to wall moss, sand, and—most especially—a speaker who, at the age of thirteen, landed in Venice in 1965 and never quite recovered from the formative experiences that shaped her there. Ranging over the several stages of a life that features adolescent heartbreak and betrayal, marriage and children, friendship and loss, the book insistently addresses the speaker’s desire to get to the bottom of her obsession with a place that has imprinted itself so indelibly on her consciousness. Intense and beautifully crafted, it is also a book of genuine grandeur, where transcendence and self-disgust clash to create a human life.