Your Funny, Funny Face
“There is a luminous harmony in this couples’ voices, but also honesty in their ‘backward forward dream’. This is a testament about how one makes a map together with a loved one. A truly beautiful book.”
—Diane Jarvenpa, author of The Way She Told Her Story
Praise
“Pat Barone’s new book of poetry, Your Funny, Funny Face, illuminates the passages of a marriage and its many revelations of desire and mortality. In stunning language, Barone reflects on all the transformations we make as women, partners and mothers. Poignant and wise in the telling of her loss, we see sorrow as one more way to find tenderness and newly recognized wonder. There is a luminous harmony in this couples’ voices, but also honesty in their ‘backward forward dream.’ This is a testament about how one makes a map together with a loved one. A truly beautiful book.”
—Diane Jarvenpa, author of The Way She Told Her Story
“Like Rita Dove’s award-winning Thomas and Beulah, Patricia Barone’s new book Your Funny, Funny Face captures the rhythms of a long marriage, perfect in its imperfection, ‘a tolerant place / where we loved and left the rest alone,’ and too, the mystery of how a genuine love endures beyond death so that the widow can write ‘Like our marriage, / my garden is still becoming / stronger with its weight of grace.’”
—John Krumberger, author of Because Autumn
“Celebrating the life of her husband and sorrowing in his loss, Pat Barone’s Your Funny, Funny Face is a poetic tribute to love and family. This collection of memory poems explores the joys of sharing a life well-lived and the ache that burrows in, and the fight not to succumb to it, when it’s over. Barone draws the reader straight into the harmony of relationship with ‘She’ll say anything, if he will say it too. And so they do’ (‘The Bride and Groom’) and ‘Warm Braille to my fingers, your breath. If I couldn’t hear you I could read your lips’ (‘Marriage Conversation’). Partnership and love radiate from the early poems. Then the reader begins the journey of pain as this couple recognizes ‘the body recedes part by part’ (‘Family Procession’) and wonders with Barone after Stan is gone, ‘Is it okay to enjoy someone’s hands on my shoulders’ (‘Checking In’)? This poignant collection reminds others who find themselves with conflicting feelings about how to move forward that they are not alone, and, though the body will die, love does not.”
—KB Ballantine, author of Almost Everything, Almost Nothing
