Yamma

In her second full-length collection, Elizabeth Poreba gives us the wry and occasionally cranky persona Yamma who ponders the peculiarities of aging, the perils of the planet she is leaving, and the prospect of becoming an ancestor. In ＂Yamma imagines she is a museum and her granddaughter an indifferent tourist,＂ she wonders how to address the distance between generational interests. More often she challenges her own ways of being - considering how she has lived her professed religious faith and asking what part she has played in creating the world as it is. Throughout the collection, Yamma goes back to the perennial problem of her incorrigible self. She is simply a body ＂encasing / a metronome, no escaping / its tic,＂ but she is also ＂this weasel, so much regrettable.＂ Ultimately, Yamma complains, ＂You’d think, on the brink / myself of one, I would come / to some / kind of conclusion.＂