Throughout The Forsaken Little Black Book, Standig practices the art of listening closely to objects, to the varied materials of life that get bartered for, treasured, hidden away, left behind, handed down. Not merely possessions, here things serve as portals-portals to places, memories, ancestors, histories, and imagination itself, for every object has a story to reveal. Using her keen sensory recall-from a flash of an earring to a doll's mustiness-and emotional candor leavened with a wry sense of humor, Standing turns her poems into acts of tender preservation, amulets of survival, and capacious containers for a wealth of experience and feeling worth passing along.
Jeanne Marie Beaumont, author of Letters from Limbo
The poems in Julie Standig's The Forsaken Little Black Book bear the mark of strength as they reckon with the past. They probe honestly but tenderly Standig's family relationships especially the one with her mother. The things, "the proud possessions" she inherits, all tell a story. The "clutch of eggs enclosed in a glass dome...with fake red velvet, / peeling" and her ugly troll doll named Inga Stinkfinger are the not so pretty reminders of the pain, anger and sadness woven through her ancestors' lives. What emerges from these clever, often-humorous narratives is a real and loving portrait of her relatives. Indeed, the poem "Polaroid" assembles them "all in one room-their love bandaged and preserved."
Wendy Fulton Steginsky, author of Let This Be Enough
Objects, places, people: beloved, tolerated, or, occasionally, hated, are democratically given their own stories in Julie Standig's The Forsaken Little Black Book. But, for me, it's Julie's voice, and the voices she calls up, that grab and won't let go. That voice is unafraid to be direct, funny, ironic, intimate, generous, and, sometimes, pissed off. It's in her first and last lines, embodying each poem's core:
"My sun, my father
My most unhappy ending"
And in the titles: "Ode to an Incision" and "Dementia, a Pantoum"
Pantoum, ode, duplex, ghazal, modern sonnets, and play with structure and shape complement Julie's voice. You may be sitting at her kitchen table, but such a menu!!
Estha Weiner, author of at the last minute
