Knock-knock

A sophisticated chapbook about aging and the brain by a prize-winning poet and professor of psychiatry. The poems come to the reader in a variety of shapes, moods and sounds. The book opens with the speaker's tender first encounters with such age-related issues as the use of a cane for mobility and the occasional challenges of memory. Only a clinical expert in diseases of the mind could have constructed the drama of the scenes that follow. Knock-knock! Who's there? Ultimately for all, it will be age. At first, it seems like a bad joke-needing a cane, memory loss, more care, forgetting even one's own name. In Knock-knock, Lewis creates the persona of an older physician who should've known what's in store. Sometimes the reality is grim, but there's humor, love, and even romance in his inventive and poetic story-telling. "Lost-and-found / is not a planned / destination." Yet we all eventually find ourselves there.