Some Flawed Magic

Patricia Caspers' second collection seeks to reconcile grief with growing up. Some Flawed Magic is an equation, and Caspers solves for all the “theorems scratched…in childhood notebooks” as she maps familial stories both past and present. Caspers asks the tough questions that make us redefine who we are in relation to the people who made us and the people we shape in turn. Poets are the orators of truth and time, and Caspers asks, “Isn’t the past always for sale?” Some Flawed Magi c is a record of ancestry that examines how “to break a family / to hold it together.” These fervent narratives ground readers in a rich description of place where “pine-lined roads” reveal and “divulge secrets / from [their] depths.” Some Flawed Magic is a wondrous coupling of memory with reality. Readers will be left tender and moved.