Clown Cantos

Whooshed to gladness, Barbara Mossberg presents her inner Clown in earnest, pondering miracle splayed and sputtering on sidewalks and in ditches and nebulae. Her Clown's pockets bulging with Dante, Dolly Parton, Ian Chillag, Einstein, Emily Dickinson, Emerson, and other poet's beloveds, under Mossberg's Big Tent is a circus of flash lyric memoir. In this sequel to Here for the Present: A Grammar of Happiness in the Present Imperfect, Mossberg makes fanfare of worms and turkeys and the so-called departed, all of whom must be sung, in comic cantos of holy ephemera alive in their own way. With a literary improv pluck, Mossberg's Yes upends despair: it is a feisty sit-down stand-up of the spirit, epic episodes and odes of a phenomenal life.