The Cracker Box Poems

From a diverse, working-class Queens neighborhood emerge Joe Benevento's coming-of-age poems of promise, misconnection, and loss. Yearnings that are undone by youthful awkwardness, peer pressure, the strictures of grownups, happenstance, and the passage of time, as when chipping collected rocks in the cellar of a boyhood friend and "... aware almost anything / could happen. This very next rock might shine / flecks of gold or hopeful bits of green beryl precious / to us, cementing our friendship on the dusty cellar / floor, until time, like someone's tidy mother, / would discard the evidence forever." Benevento reminds us that each passage of life is a coming-of-age; each entailing the acquisition of mixed memories; each providing a bittersweet bonding with time itself. Mark Belair