Missing Pieces
Decidedly dark forensic poetry and prose written in the 1970s-90s as a kind of self-exorcism during the time her husband was an investigative forensic anthropologist on high profile cases. Published by Ocean View Press in 1999, featuring atmospheric archival photos from the ‘30s and ‘40s.
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From the cover text, written by Herb Robinson, Seattle journalist:
Seattle in the Thirties and Forties was a sometimes seedy, often melancholy place, full of toil (if you were lucky enough to be working), human tragedy and blue-collar boredom. Leo Lassen’s night baseball broadcasts were the city’s most popular entertainment. Crime was commonplace. Frequently it fell to deputies in what today is called the Medical Examiner’s Office to reconstruct the facts about those with shattered bodies and fractured lives.
Reviews
Reflection on a larger sense of components. The hard and soft and missing, altogether. Reflection on the value of fragments found, whatever those fragments are taken to be: reproducible, unlikely, fey or impossibly hard to read.
—M. R. James, from the Amazon review
This, then, is the sound of silence.
—Steve Sneyd
Excerpt
…waves of colored woodcuts,
green swish goaded wild brown,
the dumb pour in,
a muddied grief
swelled and going round out
then circling back in,
pulped and logged as if for float
then down,
sky a waving shade of gray.