Happy Family: Poems

Shore, whose previous book, Music Minus One , was a finalist for the National Book Award, here reflects on incidents and domestic tableaux concerning the desperate, comical, elusive, simple, or complicated kinds of happiness indigenous to her 1950s New Jersey neighborhood. At once universal and personal, Shore’s poems are uncanny autobiographical duets for past and present, childhood and adulthood, daughter and mother. Like an album of black-and-white photos come to life, Happy Family offers an honest poetry that dignifies memory through detail.