Toni
Mirosevich possesses an uncanny ability to slip into another’s
skin. She is a born listener and watcher. Her stories are full
of wit and wryness, mirth and sorrow, of lonely, suspicious,
uneasy, endearing characters. Mirosevich moves among them and
subjects her own life to the same steady and undeceived
attention. –Valerie Trueblood, author of Seven Loves
books
Toni
Mirosevich is a poet of social conscience. She is a poet who
acknowledges that it will be strange always to be who we are,
strange always to assert ourselves, with all our self-awareness
and difference, into the world. Queer Street not only
tolerates our difference, but celebrates it. –Ralph Angel,
author of Twice Removed
What
a playful, incisive attitude The Takeaway Bin conveys.
Our rituals of frailty and justification are wittily revealed.
Since we are prone to “repeating the same folly again and
again./ We might as well turn up the volume,/ and emphasize the
obvious.” We hear phrases we know but begin to understand them
differently, we see aspects of our lives we recognize, but learn
to conceive them in new ways. Toni Mirosevich knows, “If our
interest goes below the surface plane then love will grow.” Like
the goodies we find in the takeaway bin, these poems enticingly
display what is too often carelessly tossed off by others.
–Camille Dungy, author of Suck on the Marrow and Smith Blue
“Here
is a book that tackles surprise—surprise in imagery, language,
closure. Her poems take readers somewhere new by re-seeing
common topics and mixing short fiction with poems…In section
one, female speakers imagine themselves as famous persons as
they work in traditional working-class jobs. As one woman pumps
gas for her rig, she hypothesizes herself as Madonna. Another
woman pictures herself as Ophelia as she cleans and readies a
swimming pool. Mirosevich matches standard jobs—soup kitchen
cook, blood bank deliverer, tree cutter, construction
worker—with unusual women—Betty Crocker, Hermes, Friday, and
Virginia Woolf—to create a new dialogue of experience. Sara
Greenslit—from a review in The Lesbian Review of Books
“As
a still unfurled Camp Fire Girl,” the poet writes, “I tried to
collect/ beads for good deeds but only ended up with a choker.
Fashionable,/ but tight.” Toni Mirosevich’s collection, My
Oblique Strategies, is fashionable and tight. In short,
impeccably crafted poems, Mirosevich romps from high-brow to
low-brow and back again—Dickens to Dallas, Hoffa to
Truffaut—with unusual wit, control, and range. Like Kay Ryan and
John Ashbery, Mirosevich lets language out to play, with absurd,
surprising, and enormously satisfying results. “So let sleeping
dogs lie,” she writes in the poem, “Lie or Lay,” “embellish, let
them gild/ (or yellow) the lily. My Bonnie dog lies, not lays,/
over the ocean. Either way it’s a wide, wide sea/ and if truth
be told we’re all in it very, very deep.” –Kathy Fagan, author
of The Charm
Toni
Mirosevich, Charlotte Muse, Edward Smallfield: This trio can
play in my chambers any time. Mirosevich, Muse and Smallfield
have in common an uncommon confidence of approach, a forceful
impetus for every poem and an instinct for the smooth texture,
bitter taste, spiraling motion of each word. Beyond this, they
break into singular voices, solos of impressive range and
concern. Smallfield’s improvisational magic, Muse’s humor and
dark blue meditations, Mirosevich’s bright empiricism with a
back beat—this is a volume of poetry in which the world comes
true. –Frances Mayes