The Amoeba Game
(By Tara Skurtu)
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| Author | Tara Skurtu |
On THE AMOEBA GAME:
The earned, liberated laughter of survival and foreboding; a high-voltage mind thinking in images; candid grief; an irreverence that rises above convention to a true, untamed intuition of the sacred; love, with all its penalties and joys. With these qualities, the engaging poems of Tara Skurtu’s The Amoeba Game offer a vision of our familiar world transformed by possibility. The title poem is a compact, funny parable of imagination engaging the unknown, and happy to encounter the unknowable.
—Robert Pinsky
“There’s a town in Romania/where almost everyone is a Skurtu…,” the poet Tara Skurtu hears from her father when she’s a girl in Florida thinking about aisles of zippers at Jo-Ann Fabric. Skurtu journeys into adulthood from there, her childhood state of Bible School and barracudas and a loving family’s disarray, to the dream and reality of life—and love—in Romania. In these wise, sharply observed, dazzling lyric poems, we travel, too, as she opens to—and is opened by—her ancestral adopted country.
—Gail Mazur, author Forbidden City
In The Amoeba Game, Tara Skurtu demonstrates broad, empathetic range, moving between remembering a childhood game while frying an egg to visiting her sister in jail, prayer, Ellis Island, a pink dildo defacing a statue of the Virgin Mary, boogers on a White House wall, a “cross-eyed skull” tattoo, vacation Bible school, and “your neighbor Marlene,/ her neon lips, twenty-something/feral cats, her Buick, its red and white/bumper sticker: Shit happens.” All are made real, present, with admirable, clear-eyed precision. Whether she’s talking about “[t]he fear of forgetting I am well” or wanting you so much she “walked into your morning shower fully clothed,” Tara Skurtu shows you what she means, and that she means it.
—Jill McDonough”
