Poetry. "Both laughter and tears can catch you by surprise in Barbara Ungar's SAVE OUR SHIP. As you live with these witty, satiric, and at times wrenching poems, you will find that their humor darkens while their sadness grows strangely lighter. Ungar's examination of contemporary mores, mordant while avoiding self-pity, displays a range of moods that recalls the poetry of the late William Matthews, for whom the poet contributes an elegy, 'Dear Bill,' which may be the best I have read of that mordant, witty, and keenly insightful poet. What have we here? In part we have an apology for a generation, the Baby Boomers, who have populated their emotional lives with their intellectual acumen and savage wit and failed romances and sense of the absurd and the awful recognition that it might be too late to do anything for the planet. The book begins with the revelation of an anti-feminist Medieval alphabet and employs a running joke on the alphabet itself subversively underlined by the Morse Code. Yet emotional ambush lurks around every corner, from spousal abuse ('How It Happens'), to the contradictions of modern philosophy ('Brush Up Your Heidegger'), to the Holocaust ('I Go On the Road of All the Earth'), to the urban spirituality to be found in a Zumba session ('After Zumba'). One of the astringent reminders of SAVE OUR SHIP, including its title poem, is the disaster of climate change. There is an unsettling retrospective vision of what we have come to, a realization that Cassandra still walks among us telling her truth, being heard and yet being ignored. You will not be able to ignore Ungar's wonderful poems. They are memorable. They make us think again about our lives and the brave, complicated humor that may somehow redeem us."--Mark Jarman A collection of 57 poems that sound alarms about current ecological, political, and cultural trends. Ungar (English/Coll. of Saint Rose; Immortal Medusa, 2015, etc.) provides helpful notes to explain her inspirations for this impressive volume of free verse, which includes transgressive female voices of the past and present; Cassandra, Emily Dickinson, and Audre Lorde make appearances. Alphabetical order is a recurring theme, as is Morse code. The title poem makes reference to rising, polluted seas; the placement of seven lines of SOS in Morse code seems to form waves. Environmental disasters are another urgent concern, as seen in Endnotes to Coral Reefs and Naming the Animals, a partial list of extinct species that ends with a gut punch: Four species an hour. Language is also under attack, as revealed in Elegy, which alphabetically lists words eliminated from the Oxford Junior Dictionary ( bluebell, buttercup ) and arrays them as if they re drifting away. In contrast, newly included words ( blog, broadband ) are clustered in a solid block of text. Clever manipulation of language, space, and punctuation abounds. Quoth the Queane riffs on the letter Q, while To You, U explores the personal and linguistic history of Ungar s initial. Après Moi offers 21 variations on the phrase Let them eat cake with cake replaced by evocative signifiers, such as bump stocks, the lying press, tax returns, opiates, and paper towels. Dystopian poems will resonate with many readers, such as The Woman With a Live Cockroach in her Skull and its slippery preposition: She wakes screaming / each morning at the news. Man Bun Ken is a humorous meditation on the fate of the latest iteration of Barbie s companion: Future archaeologists / may stumble upon his simulacra / & mistake him for a shape-shifting god. The book is full of keen insights regarding the passage of time, whether one is attending a wedding with one s first boyfriend, taking a nostalgic walk through the West Village, or observing a spider and her web. Overall, Ungar suggests that language and memory are futile attempts to impose order on the chaos that surrounds us. A distress call that s worth reading and heeding. --Kirkus Review Barbara Ungar is a master weaver of lyricism and narration. She creates dreamlike otherworlds that I want to delve into and never return from. She writes in ethereal beauty, whether it s in NYC or on the beach, capturing miracles. --Green Briar Review Barbara Ungar's books include SAVE OUR SHIP (Ashland Poetry Press, 2019), IMMORTAL MEDUSA, which was one of Kirkus Reviews' Best Indie Poetry Books of 2015—a starred review begins, "Ungar's new collection may not make her immortal, but it surely establishes her as a contemporary poet of the first rank"—CHARLOTTE BRONTË, YOU RUINED MY LIFE, Thrift , and The Origin of the Milky Way , which won the Gival Prize, an Independent Publishers' silver medal, and a Hoffer award, and was co-winner of the Adirondack Center for Writing Poetry Award. A professor at the College of Saint Rose in Albany, she lives in Saratoga Springs, New York.