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Bread and Fumes, poems
These photos and blurbs relate to Bread and Fumes, a collection of poems that explore my Ukrainian heritage and relatives. “No easy way through,” says the daughter of a World War II labor camp survivor, and the poems in Lynn Fanok’s new book Bread and Fumes bring a remarkable compassion and wonder to the story of growing in a house rich in language—kyshka, holubtsi, studzienina—and aromas, but also rife with anger. No poet more bravely helps us to appreciate the mythic paradoxes that can dominate a childhood. “I live with a fire breathing dragon,” the young daughter tells her friends, but her father is also the man at the kitchen table making pierogies. When she writes of her small Polish keepsake box made out of linden, with its hidden lever opening a secret drawer, she could be describing her own poems. Poets like Lynn Fanok inspire us to try these hidden levers and open these secret drawers. There is “no easy way through,” and poetry understands this. “What to do?” Fanok asks in “Dispossessed” and then answers her own question, “Release the dark swallows / lodged in my throat.” —Christopher Bursk, author of Improbable Swervings of Atoms In Lynn Fanok’s moving collection, Bread & Fumes, she weaves together wonderfully nostalgic poems rich with the traditions brought to this country from Eastern Europe: boisterous family suppers at the kitchen table filled with dumplings, sauerkraut, vodka; visits to cousins in the country or to see her Bapcia in Brooklyn; learning to dance the Hopak. But within these snapshots is an undercurrent of terror that spills from the ravages of WWII during which time her father was forced to work in a Nazi labor camp—his “implacable” rage and the dark places that permeate all their lives. “From the back seat, I studied / the back of my father’s dark head,” Fanok writes, in her longing to know and understand how identity, both her father’s and her own, is formed by the confluence of varied and often unknowable forces. Fanok reminds us of our own searching for who we are with poems that are quietly compelling, always unassuming, and remarkably tender. —Cheryl Baldi, author of The Shapelessness of Water Reading Bread and Fumes is like watching someone turn the pages in a family album of tautly composed snapshots. Each moment is doubly seen—with both the sensory immediacy of a young girl’s experience and her greater insight as an adult. Graceful in their economy, the double consciousness of these poems perfectly suits their speaker’s situation as the daughter of an Eastern European father who survived a Nazi labor camp only to flee from a Stalinist occupation. There is joy here and community, even as the child of a trauma survivor learns to “live with a fire breathing dragon.” —Randall Couch, Poet |
Dad, John, Susan, me in Port Republic, NJ
Bapcia, Uncle Steve,
and Aunt Marie, Brooklyn, NY
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