In Opening Ceremony, Laura Marie Marciano’s second collection, the Fourth of July happens at least three times, but the American Dream still doesn’t come. Instead, “your boss hires her husband over you,” “[t]he dean won’t hire adjuncts / full time,” then:

Opening Ceremony
Laura Marie Marciano

Metatron Press
$18.00
paper
64pp
9781988355603

Five months pregnant and I find out my

contract was not renewed through an

automated email from university

computing services

Not a context conducive to art, but make art we must. Amid dark undercurrents that often implicate poet and reader alike, Marciano creates her own rituals. She finds beauty in astonishing collections of objects and sensations, such as in “BOMB ROSE WATER”:

[…] I feel the boulder of despair shrink a little

when I think of […] that piña colada

with candy cherry scent you gave me in the car on the long

road to Loiza sitting out the window while Ava Maria played

off Bluetooth and it’s ok if no one gets us really

At the centre of this ceremony is “melo” (short for Carmelo), to whom the book is dedicated. Make no mistake, this is a love poem; its arc is the poet-muse’s relationship, at once so romantic and realistic that Elizabeth Barrett Browning would both nod in approval and blush.mRb