Balancing Acts

Straddling the boundaries between fiction and poetry, memoir and fantasy, the poems in Rochelle Ratner’s Balancing Acts chronicle the growth of one woman, or a mythic Everywoman, from early childhood through school, marriage, and the death of loved ones. “Rochelle Ratner explores the forgotten corners of one’s life, the bits of nourishment one finds but is not given, or is given only to hunger for more... The effect of this narrative in prose poems is unsettling, as if the cobwebs in the corners of our own lives had been pulled aside.”—Jessica Treat