Lifshin's latest chapbook, August Wind, in prose feels a lot like her poetry - the terse, unemotional tone, the economy of language, the unsentimentality. And yet feelings evoked are of pathos and stoic endurance of psychic as well as physical pain.

Presented is an aging mother dying of inoperable cancer, attended by two daughters and a son-in-law who don't get along. They are trapped together, the past and the future compressed in the pressure cooker of the present. there is a race against onrushing death. Life is clung to and then the grip is relaxed, much like a flickering candle in low oxygen, flaring up briefly before waning into the dark

The great appeal of Lifshin's prose, as in her poetry, is that she is passionate and compassionate, never invoking the mawkish or cloying sentimental in the range of her subjects. Lyn Lifshin is a realistic romantic, tough but tender, giving no quarter nor asking any, but facing life and love and loss as it is and not as it might, or should be. This little book is a deeply moving experience

SMALL PRESS REVIEW
July-August 2007 vol. 39 Nos 7-8