An Enlarged Heart

Starred review from February 15, 2013
Interconnected autobiographical essays from a poet whose life in New York City has bestowed both blessings and heartbreak. In gauzy yet substantial prose, Zarin (The Ada Poems, 2010, etc.) takes readers on a journey through a lifetime's worth of homes, relationships and landscapes, displaying wry humor and an endearing sense of uneasiness with the tropes of memoir. Far from an exhibitionist's tell-all, this collection instead grants us entry into the world of a private person, a woman who acknowledges that she is "entirely unsuited to selflessness" and who doles out tantalizingly cryptic bits of personal information. Zarin often depicts herself as a dreamer gazing out of windows, pretending that the spire of a metropolitan church resembles one in Prague or conflating the characters in films and books based on shared imagery. Indeed, one of the great pleasures of the book is the recurring nature of its images: Yellow stockings, blue bowls of strawberries, diaphanous curtains, familiar restaurants and drinking straws flit through these essays like the dragonflies that the author describes cyclically swarming at her favorite beach. None of this should suggest frivolity, however, for Zarin also excels at tackling difficult subjects with grace; "September" simply begins, "The Thursday before I received a telephone call from the children's school." The date that remains absent from that sentence permeates the rest of the essay. She treats the Holocaust, childhood fears and her youngest daughter's illness with similarly powerful restraint, which makes her reaction to the latter especially potent: "I think, If this child dies, I will go mad. I think of a woman who wishes me ill, and I think, If something happens to this child, I will kill her." Pulses with a life force that illustrates why this poet "had also begun to love the shape that prose made in [her] head."

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February 15, 2013

An award-winning poet, essayist, and writer of children's books, Zarin includes 12 essays in this work, some having appeared in such publications as the New York Times and Granta. Whether it is the hospital room where she sits by her daughter's bedside or the offices of The New Yorker where she worked after college, Zarin evokes the scenes and the milieu for the reader in these personal recollections, written over the past 10 years but covering her entire life. Sometimes there is too much back and forth between past and present or in establishing which husband she is talking about, so that the thread of the piece is lost, but in the majority of the pieces she is an able guide and holds readers' interest. That she does so with such idiosyncratic and personal topics as coats or her tailor is all the more commendable. VERDICT This engaging book is highly recommended, especially for those who are familiar with the streets and landmarks of New York City.--Gina Kaiser, Univ. of the Sciences Lib., Philadelphia

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2013
Poet, children's author, and journalist Zarin was the fashion writer for the New Yorker while she was in her twenties in the 1980s, and her passion for beautiful fabric and well-tailored attire, especially coats, is the catalyst for many of her lustrously descriptive, complexly emotional, and exquisitely crafted personal essays. But marriage and motherhood are the lifeblood of her acute observations and incisive reflections, from an interrupted honeymoon in Italy to the terrifying title piece about her youngest daughter's battle with a rare malady. Each episode is ensnaring, each setting scrupulously and atmospherically evoked in language silken and cut on the bias. But it is what she makes out of these reassembled remnants of memory that imbues this book with its lambent beauty and philosophical resonance. As Zarin retrieves indelible incidents from her life stained with chagrin, regret, and shock, she reflects on the quiet arts of reclamation and refurbishing, discovering in those practiceswhich are much like writing itselfways to live with disquieting change, mortifying mistakes, and condemned dreams, ways to alter, mend, repair, and begin again.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)