Yvonne Zipter’s Kissing the Long Face of the Greyhound

Yvonne Zipter’s Kissing the Long Face of the Greyhound (Terrapin Books, 2020) navigates nature, family, and her mother’s breast cancer together to create a collection that loves and mourns. 

Zipter’s larger themes echo in quiet ways across poems. Her poems sing with alliteration and enjambment to create haunting sound and imagery. In “Rattlesnake, Carr Fire, California, 2018,” Zipter uses sound to mimic fire: “But the flame / consumed him, left a scar of char…. a monument to his own valor,” and echoes that effect again in “Osteosarcoma: A Love Poem” with, “.... ribboned with fur / and eddies of dust churned to a smoke, / the sweet slenderness of that languorous / lick of calcium…. “

Recurrent images cast the reader into a lush, green, clear-blue spot—calm and lulled. The scarred table from “Hummingbird” returns in “Cleaning Fish, Post Lake, July 1941.” Lakes, oceans, and rivers nearly touch every poem. This allows the love and grief in Zipter’s family to swim through both pleasant memories and the reality of her mother’s cancer before sinking back down and reappearing several poems later. 

Zipter’s imagery memorializes her mother’s cancer in her prosthetic breast in “Grace Lessons” with: “When it came—the foam rubber mound, studded / with ball bearings to give the heft / of flesh—she secured it / like a keepsake // in her new bra’s secret chamber, / a lifeless echo to her sound left side.”

So, too, her death in “Corner Store”: “And what about my mother, / amateur seamstress to the end—is she sending guidance / from the other side, disguised as sewing instruction?” This language handles difficult personal topics with care and attention.  

In “Naming the World,” Zipter’s final image is the most haunting: “But in a language picked clean, / all a dying whale’s future holds / is being groomed / by bone-eating worms.”

Kissing the Long Face of the Greyhound wriggles into the mind and heart. Zipter’s sound charms and her imagery lingers. Her work shines like “winking sunlight through the window.”

December, 2020