BOOK NOOK: Closing out National Poetry Month with some extraordinary poetry

The second half of the book, “Bayside, Queens, as Seen from the Window of a Car,” has an urban vibe. Some poems recall fond memories of now obsolete technologies; like transistor radios, compasses, and typewriters.

She observes keenly. In “Autocorrect for Beauty” she notices this hawk:

“I’ve passed the empty pergola at least five hundred times since then, in every kind of weather, but if I look, my hawk is there: beauty by surprise overrides all succeeding days-and so the part of us that isn’t us survives.”

In a city poem, “Making Beauty,” she sees a young man in the subway:

“I thought about beauty-how making it and seeing it are lonely in different ways: one the loneliness of being in sole command, the other of being the only witness.”

My personal favorites are poems about her grandparents. In “Wild Grapes” she writes:

“By the time I knew them, my grandparents didn’t say much to each other beyond what was unavoidable: I remember my grandfather flipping his table knife around-holding the blade-pointing the back end at a bowl of butter, my grandmother passing it.”

Each poem in “Which Way Was North” tells a miniature, exquisite story. Recently Weise and her partner Ben Miller, moved back to New York City. Miller’s 2013 memoir, “River Bend Chronicle: the Junkification of a Boyhood Idyll amid the Curious Glory of Urban Iowa” is one of my favorite books of all time.

Vick Mickunas of Yellow Springs interviews authors every Saturday at 7 a.m. and on Sundays at 10:30 a.m. on WYSO-FM (91.3). For more information, visit www.wyso.org/programs/book-nook. Contact him at vick@vickmickunas.com.

Credit: Contributed

Credit: Contributed