REVIEW Tasha Pippin
If this world falls apart:
Moments of Stunning Intimacy
Lou Lipsitz. if this world falls apart. Spokane, WA: Lynx House Press, 2011. $15.95, paper.
Lipsitz starts his collection off with a group of narrative poems about family, so we read first about the poet’s grandfather, father, mother, son, and the poet himself as a child. Here, we not only feel an early connection to the poet, but unearth some striking images within the nostalgia, especially in “Fishing With My Son on Lake Champlain.” The poet harkens back to his days in a “sun‐flooded rowboat thirty years ago,” the beauty of a northern pike, “fierce and beautiful” mirroring the beauty of the boy and the moment itself, before the “long filament of days stretch[ed] itself across the water,” the “reel let[] out the line:/almost invisible…settling quietly downward.” These early poems seem fitting to start off a collection called if this world falls apart. First, we are seeing and experiencing the poet’s world. And what sort of world is this? A world in which flickers of observation manifest into a Raleigh Review 61
