Kissing Ilaria Goodbye

Scenes from a marriage... The anatomy of a marriage... Narratives that have compelled us since Euripides' Medea, not least for their portrayal of the precarious position of women, comprise a rich literary vein from which a new story has emerged. It is a rough-cut gem. Not suitable for final polishing. Therein lies the beauty of Kissing Ilaria Goodbye, the latest collection by Brooklyn-based poet Hilary Sideris.

Reader's familiar with Sideris' poetry know it for a signature voice that rises from her natural economy of expression, subtle wit, and true love of language. But in Kissing Ilaria Goodbye (Ilaria is Italian for Hilary) readers will encounter a new depth of exploration and expression as the poet turns her always-observant eye increasingly upon herself with unsparing honesty. Poems telling the story of Sideris' marriage to her Roman husband, her eventual proposal of divorce, and the determination of fate before and after that mid-volume proposal are written with startling immediacy, abjuring any common notion of narrative resolution.

Scenes in the collection play against a backdrop of societal crisis, government collapse and the quotidian landscape of simply getting along. My marriage / & my country failed. Now I have / time to study Greek, she tells us in "Louloudia". What is most poignant across the collection and in each poem, however, is not the vivid contextual scenery-the confines of a Camry hurtling down the New Jersey Turnpike, a day stretching out along Church Avenue in Brooklyn-but the portraiture.

Sideris peoples vignettes with well-drawn characters, none more memorable and ultimately sympathetic than the beleaguered husband, Vincenzo.

These poems, slow, delicate and wise, can't help but elicit readers' empathy. The title poem, lamenting the loss of a cherished identity, is heartbreaking, setting the stage for later poems in which the narrator struggles to bring a truer identity into focus.

And there is sex. Notably in "Spandex", a marvelous demonstration of how much Sideris can express-sadness, longing, grief, adventure, a confessional element-in a short, narrow strip of words on a page. The poem "Nutshell" nails it as Sideris humorously quotes Verdi's admonition to a librettist, Francesco Piave: "DO NOT FORGET / FEW WORDS! I REPEAT / FEW WORDS!!"

Much is accomplished in few words elsewhere, given Sideris' passion for the Italian language, especially in exchanges with Vincenzo, where she deftly deploys the sometimes misleading pleasures of words and forms-false cognates, silent vowels, lost syllables, prepositions that intervene and change intended meaning completely.

Sideris reminds us in these poems that all empires fall. All things decay. People die, all of us. That love itself has its demise baked in-the collection is launched with an epigraph from Romeo & Juliet. Love, she shows us, may also be our salvation as we seek to recognize what is good, what to hold on to and what to let go; as we come to grips with our solitary being and the finality of that which cannot be changed.