Genre: Poetry
Memory is a slippery thing. It holds onto grief like an old attic filled with relics—dusty, fragile, but impossible to discard. LoSchiavo’s poetry is an exercise in retrieval, an attempt to reconstruct the past with a precision that only time and heartbreak can refine. The collection traces a trajectory of womanhood, family history, and loss, often through unexpected poetic forms like haibun, tankas, centos, and golden shovels.
Some poets paint nostalgia with a soft brush; LoSchiavo wields a scalpel. The poem His Funeral Without Me captures the frustration of childhood grief, the way it denies participation in the rituals of loss. “Too young for gravesites,” the narrator is left to imagine the burial, separated from it by both age and fate.
Isn’t that what memory does? It rewrites the script until we believe we were there, after all.
A New York That Breathes Ghosts
LoSchiavo’s New York isn’t the one tourists gawk at—it’s the city as a living, aching entity. Streets aren’t just pathways; they are witnesses. Shadows don’t just fall; they stay. In The Poltergeists of President Street, the city’s architecture absorbs pain, holding onto past traumas like a tenement building holds onto its history.
New York isn’t just a setting in this collection—it’s a haunting presence, sometimes benevolent, sometimes cruel. The poem Serving on the Grand Jury in New York County is a reminder that justice, much like poetry, depends on the voices willing to speak.
The Science of Heartbreak
Studies show that grief has physical consequences. The body doesn’t just feel loss—it remembers it. A 2020 study found that bereavement can cause a measurable inflammatory response in the brain, mimicking the effects of physical injury. Reading Apprenticed to the Night feels like proof of this phenomenon. The poems don’t just depict loss; they resurrect it. Mother on Morphine captures the hallucinatory space between life and death, as a dying parent drifts between memory and morphine-induced fantasy.
These poems do not offer easy closure—because real grief never does.
Why This Collection Matters
In Apprenticed to the Night, LoSchiavo crafts a poetic landscape where history, memory, and loss collide. She proves that poetry isn’t just about beauty—it’s about precision, about truth-telling, about holding a mirror to the dark and demanding it to speak.
This book isn’t just a collection of poems. It’s an apprenticeship in what it means to remember.
Content Warning
This collection deals with themes of grief, family loss, abandonment, illness, and death. Some poems touch on historical trauma and emotional distress, making this a poignant but intense read.
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