Mrs. Nussbaum’s Monkey by Frank Lehner

Mrs. Nussbaum's Monkey takes us into a Pittsburgh that's gone but will never go away, a place of bridges and stairs and tugboats, Skookum Field and the Iron City sign, where people and animals that share their space negotiate daily to survive, and to survive themselves. With ee cummings' inversion of language and a clear eye for the "beauty and indignity," Frank Lehner demands that we see anew. This book of hours has space for legend, for angry husbands and practical saints and stolen dogs and old soldiers "trying to make sense of their stiff legs." men broken by war and work whose ghosts can't quit Pittsburgh any more than the living can. But grace awaits. We try to speak into the stone ear of God, when What we need is what our fathers taught us: "…the oiled glove, the small garden,/the clean tool, and sitting on a dock without a sound, watching a bobber."-Valerie Nieman