Lines in Opposition is an apt title for Maureen Sherbondy’s collection of observant, reflective, and sometimes acerbic poems. The lines are forthright and the strategic dissonance makes a music suggestive of klezmer: stimulating, energetic, no-holds-barred fun—serious fun. These pieces woke me up. Some will keep me awake.

Lines in Opposition discovers truths without abstractions. Images and details endorse the hope that marriages might secure Love within families—fathers, mothers, children, friends. Maureen Sherbondy recreates a Past that disappears and reappears with every syllable like a dozer leveling walls inside a house we are invited to enter: one big room shudders with longings for humanity to harmonize elegiac songs of togetherness.

Maureen Sherbondy’s Dancing with Dali whirls readers through a surreal world where lost wishes inhabit their own museum, Picasso works in the food court at a mall and Van Gogh may have lost his ear in a sword fight with Gauguin. Some of these ingenious poems are inspired by well-known masterworks like Rene Magritte’s “Golconda” and Max Ernst’s “Ubu Imperator,” others by paintings that do not exist, but should. Part gallery and part carnival, these are luminous and distinctively original poems for anyone willing to lose themselves in the funhouse of a madcap imagination. Dancing with Dali will surely sweep readers off their well-grounded feet.

Power. Pow! Her! These poems will punch you in the heart, grab your mind mightily. Sherbondy wears Wonder Woman boots and they can kick you alive with love, loss and just plain living. She’s ‘touching fire to land once kissed and tended,’ ‘a scarecrow swallowing a wallow of stars.’ She’s iron fisted, heavy hammered and she knows her name. You will too. Stunning work from a poet whose praises cannot help but be sung.

From a long marriage that crashes and burns to a humorous look at first date disasters after divorce, the bold poems in The Art of Departure are smart and sassy with a fierce beauty that transforms loss and longing. ‘What was there before departure?’ Maureen Sherbondy asks in the book’s first poem ‘Meditation on Leaving.’ The poems that follow do not so much attempt to answer that question, as to confront and come to a reckoning with loss, whether that loss is a baby bird that fell from the nest, the death of a father, or the end of a marriage. ‘…jump / and hope to fly,’ she writes in the poem ‘Fly.’ Yes, indeed, these poems fly straight to the heart of anyone who has experienced loss.

Waving her magic wand, Maureen A. Sherbondy transforms classic fairy tales into contemporary fables: Goldilocks becomes a senile woman who sleeps on other residents’ beds in a nursing home, Rapunzel loses her hair to chemotherapy, and the Old Woman Who Lives in a Shoe abandons her children. The poems push beyond the margins of fairy tales into modern mutations of mystery, betrayal, and loss. Despite multiple personae and shape-shifting, the unique voice of the poet remains constant.

With humor and raw, dark beauty, Maureen Sherbondy shows us a world of broken, aging survivors. Her characters dance on the edge of loneliness and longing; they inhabit lost dreams where happily-ever-afters have twisted into financial, emotional, and physical hardship. And yet, one word rises out of this haunting, unforgettable collection of poems: acceptance.

Sherbondy is the kind of writer who grabs her figurative baseball bat and confronts her demons, head-on. Then—lucky for us—she takes up her pen and tells readers all about it. Eulogy for an Imperfect Man tackles subjects like death, loss, and dysfunctional families in the sort of visceral way that not only lets us know how brave this poet is, but how good she is at her craft.

Sútra is a Sanskrit word that literally means thread. From its opening poem, Sútra, Maureen Sherbondy’s Scar Girl threads together a cautionary tale of a girl, scarred from life in a dysfunctional house, yet reaching for stars just out of reach. There is a clever stirring of Jack and Jill from nursery rhyme in a couple of poems, an appearance by King Kong in another, and a giant who annually tramples through her summer garden. Maureen Sherbondy masterfully stitches together poems that employ metaphor and image to set up superb endings.

What a thought-provoking collection for a Jewish audience! Moving from the concrete details of Jewish rituals to their spiritual implications, Sherbondy is full of wisdom and surprises- sometimes ironic, often dark, full of yearning for the tikkun olam seamstresses to stitch the broken world back together with their needles and threads. And what a treat, in the midst of the spiritual struggle, to find in the poet’s contemplation of a praying mantis that has landed on her prayer book, one of those rare, transcendent moments when “God’s long fingers are reaching, guiding us toward a promise.” These tough-minded, deceptively lovely poems yield up more of their considerable power with each successive reading.

All in all, Praying at Coffee Shops is marvelously effective poetry, full of little realizations and multiple layers of meaning that the best poetry delights us with.