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Hilary Sideris's wonderful new book Kissing Ilaria Goodbye explores marriage, divorce, memory, and identity through poems brightly alive with humor, longing, and linguistic play.
Moving between Brooklyn, Rome, and Greece, this sharp-eyed collection follows the speaker and her husband Vincenzo through arguments, cultural misunderstandings, television binges, medical anxieties, political absurdities, and moments of tenderness. Sideris blends multilingual wordplay with references ranging from Pinocchio and Mastroianni to TikTok, therapy, and online dating. These poems are punchy and profound, both funny and fiercely moving. Kissing Ilaria Goodbye is a terrific meditation on intimacy, self, and our roiling modern world. -Jennifer Michael Hecht, author of Who Said (Copper Canyon) Titling a book after the muse of poetry and music might seem a gutsy move -- though one that Hilary Sideris handles adeptly in her new collection -- but this also was the name of her Greek grandmother transplanted to the American midwest ("unsmiling in her heavy black"), and thus a portal into family and memory and not always pleasant history. More so even than typical for poetry, this book is all about language, or languages, the intersection of cultures and lives living on in words, and more specifically in names. Including her own rather eccentric name: recalling that she was "a sullen child" -- "I wasn't / joyful, glad in Latin, / propitious in Greek" -- she finds now "I age my way / into hilarity." That hilarity, that joy, is evident throughout this collection, even when her subjects turn dark. An opening epigraph from the dictionary reminds us of another meaning of the title, naming an antique steam-powered musical instrument that once lured patrons over long distances to "showboats, circuses, and carnivals," and this meaning is also apt as Sideris lures us across the world to witness the spectacle of her life. Appropriately, she leaves us in a small unfinished church in Greece, where "We're beyond history. We have no / slot to put each other in." -Amber Charmei, author of "Six Poets Illuminating the Modern Greek Soul" Hilary Sideris's poems flash forward at lightning speed. Before you can blink, there's a back story, details become volatile, and we're catapulted into unfathomable history. The Q train goes express, a plague strikes. The America of "foaming root beer/in thick glass mugs" confronts active shooter drills. A "BLT's pale tomato" implies a vast system of servitude. Always, language is a bridge and a wall. Always, events elude the stories we shelter in. Jaime Sabines wrote, "everything happens in silence/the way light is made in the eye;" Sideris can access that inscrutability of experience, how we know ourselves only through clues and only in retrospect. LIBERTY LAUNDRY is a book of gorgeous immediacy and depth.
Dennis Nurkse, author of A Country of Strangers: New and Selected Poems Autism is a survival trait among prey animals. It's a rational instinct for separating a detail from the whole of something because a detail can kill you, while the whole of everything will let you live--most of the time. Sideris too focuses on those magic details. And in each of these short, lusty poems, she weaves the detail back into a fuller picture, now sharing its space with revelation to prepare us for the quickly approaching hour when we humans will become the prey animals, the shy but curious feast of our own predation. Barrett Warner, editor, Free State Review and Galileo Press |
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The Silent B -- twenty-nine short poems, each based upon a single word: dumb fire, sack, mint, dole, bank, seam. Each a punch to the solar plexus. Each another breath knocked out of you. Will she remind you not Emily Dickinson? Probably. Of Kay Ryan? More than likely. Surely they are soul sisters for whom life is language and language life. But this is Hilary Sideris for whom no word is allowed to keep silent. For whom the word Praise must be shouted from the rooftops. J. R. Solonche
Suspended between languages, the spare poems of Hilary Sideris's Un Amore Veloce suggest that a chain of personal discoveries secures our essential comfort, particularly in marriage and family life. They assure us of the possibility of renewal through observation and salvation through sharing -- the premise of all art and the twin engines of love at any speed. In this collection, Sideris commits to sharing her observations with honesty, courage, and humor in poems that spare us nothing. Rick Mullin |
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The Inclination to Make Waves is full of linguistic tricks, lively metaphysics, and shades of amorous play that range from joyous, to coy, to melancholy. In these poems - all of them tight couplets of five or six stanzas - she's alert to the nuances of sound and sense, tweaking idioms, teasing out strands of etymology, making the full range of language operative in the moment of the poem. Inspired by each poem's title-word, she seizes on its linguistic possibilities, to build from word to world. Neil Shepard |
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You needn't give a toss about Keith Richards or his autobiography to love Hilary Sideris's 'Most Likely To Die'. Each poem is a stand-alone vignette, with the lasting resonance of a haiku. But the cumulative power of this volume is visceral. These poems, one after another, each as rich as a blues 78, have attitude while still being tender. Covering the full arc of Richards's life, from wartime Britain to Altamont and other crossroads, these poems exemplify how a precise image or anecdote can make an Everyman out of an icon. Steve Koenig |