DEATH, PLEASE WAIT by Rochelle Jewel Shapiro is full of wrenching details and remarkable humor. A teenage romance leads to a long marriage, followed by the husband's violent dementia and death. The intimate workings of love are laid bare. The couple is separated from the start (he is in a nursing home), but we see them together through all the years of their union, the details of which are so specific that we see ourselves as well. We see the ambivalence and the steadfastness of love in all its phases. The poetry is powerful and raw and original, full of flowers and the "whine of anonymous farts." The range of emotion and expression is astonishing.
Rochelle Jewel Shapiro's novel, Miriam the Medium (Simon & Schuster, 2005), was nominated for the Harold U. Ribelow Award. She's published essays in NYT (Lives) and Newsweek. Her poetry, short stories, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in many literary magazines such as Los Angeles Review, The Moth, Negative Capability, Rio Grande Review, and Passager. Her poetry has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize, and won the Branden Memorial Literary Award from Negative Capability. Spry Magazine nominated her poem for the Best of the Net. She currently teaches writing at UCLA Extension.
