WE ARE BEACH GLASS

A cozy volume of poetry that touches on family, life on Long Island, and current events.

In her introduction, Sloane says that the idea for this collection emerged during the long periods of mandated quarantine at the beginning of the pandemic. She began editing and writing her poetry in earnest after retiring from her career in publishing and attending local writing workshops. She organized these 60-plus poems into nine thematic groups. “Earthly Wonder,” for example, is a collection of reverent location- and nature-based poems, while “Shelter in Place” explores how the pandemic has changed our relationships to space and one another. She includes a series of poems about her family (“A Family Affair”) and addresses two of the most poignant poems to each of her parents. Sloane’s style leans toward casual intimacy, using line breaks to cut up sentences and longer phrases with accessible imagery that draws on the domesticity of everyday life, like doing the New York Timescrossword puzzle or people-watching at a museum. The phrasing is occasionally clichéd or awkward, (“Ghosts of family members passed return” and “it winds itself up like a top”). The most evocative poems in the bunch have a solid concept, like “Roadtrip,” in which the subjects are referred to only as state names: “Three college women — / New York, Ohio, Tennessee — / newly acquainted, looking for something to do / on a Saturday night in ’72,” or “Keeping House”: “We clean up in fits and starts over months / that have melted into one long day of hiding.” The title poem is a standout despite being one of the shortest in the book, with a conceit many will be able to empathize with: “no one comes through unscathed. / We are shards of beach glass — / sharp edges worn smooth by the tides.”

A comforting, if not groundbreaking, read that revels in life’s minutiae.