I give it Five Stars!

Elegant, exquisite, intelligent.  These adjectives as well as other modifiers exalting the superlative can be used without overstatement to describe the collection of poems titled Uncomfortable Minds by Larry Sorkin. These poems evoke sensory as well as thought provoking experiences.  You meet the poet as you would meet—in his or her own words—the author of an excellent memoir, well written, enriching. These poems are expressions of grace.

In his poem “the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls,”—e.e. Cummings writes that these ladies “are unbeautiful and have comfortable minds.” This line appears to have inspired Sorkin’s poem, “Cambridge Ladies and Magic Soap.”  This in turn appears to have inspired the title of this remarkable collection.  Sorkin writes that as of the time of publication, he was still not comfortable with the title.  Given his profound inquisitiveness and his inventive imagination the reader may wonder if there is much that he closely examines with which Sorkin is comfortable.

We meet Sorkin the poet in the first poem “Masquerade,” where, as the poem closes, he pretends to be a small-machine mechanic—which he is not. He thinks that he rarely fools himself, though even a chainsaw sees through his ruse and refuses to start.

Here and throughout the collection we see a poet who is self-effacing, humorous, sometimes unfulfilled, sometimes insecure, sometimes taking life seriously and just as often not.  “Masquerade” begins a journey that takes off, skipping along over the valleys and hills of the poet’s life, and lands with the poet describing himself as “a guy getting old/rocking an afternoon on the porch, eyeballing/forever . . .”

The poems poignantly portray the poet and his generation on a journey not to be missed.