"Eve the Inventor" by Karen Greenbaum-Maya

When Eve bites into the apple, she invents Time. In the small space of 18 poems, Greenbaum-Maya transverses that time using a cast of heroes: her grandfather the undercover Nazi hunter, Buster Keaton, her dance teacher Irene Serata, Van Gogh, her classmate the math genius, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Rembrandt, Einstein (and a mathematical explanation of why he stopped wearing socks). The souls in these pages all embellished this earth with art, music, science, or dance. The author’s insights into culture and cultural history are rich and surprising, and often humorous. But she is not naïve. Even in the shadow of war and antisemitism, she manages to build a world where we can believe, once more, that it might all be worth saving. She reminds us that this world, however imperfect, is what we have, that it is rich and worthy—that we each have it in us to make it rich and worthy—and that at least while we are alive, there is no way to leave.

Karen Greenbaum-Maya’s wonderful, slender Eve the Inventor demonstrates how a handful of pages can become a multitude in the right hands—a universe populated not just by the Biblical Eve and her serpent but also by George Clooney, Ginger Rogers, Buster Keaton, Rachel Maddow, Albert Einstein, the fictional Deanna Troi, and more, all mingling with one another and the speaker’s relatives, friends, and lost loves, dancing, writing poetry, putting on socks, hunting Nazis. These busy worlds are often dangerous, and they’re always fascinating.

A range of diverse and eccentric voices and characters populate the bizarre world, theatre, stage of Karen Greenbaum-Maya’s prose poetry collection. The prose poem is the perfect vehicle for Greenbaum-Maya’s sharp and experimental work to shine light on an absurd age. I hope everyone enjoys this memorable, vibrant collection! 

Karen Greenbaum-Maya’s previous collection of poetry, The Beautiful Leaves, is a touching (and agonizing) examination of the hurricane of loss, grief, and despair that rages around the loss of a loved one. When I first read it, I was in the middle of a three-year period of time in which I lost most of my family (father, mother, little brother), and what struck me most about her writing in that book was the honesty and insight of her expression. Anyone who’s been through that hell recognizes the truth in every word she wrote.
Eve the Inventor, her new chapbook, mixes elements of the memoir from her previous collection, and combines them with ekphrasis, and touches on a multitude of themes ranging from the detached “care” of the American healthcare system (“Soprano and nurse sing a bittersweet duet that shows how the nurse, though kind, is just doing her job, thinking about what she’ll be doing once her shift is over. The soprano will not get time off”), to what it means to exist is a post-Covid, post-truth America, to gender roles, to the male gaze, to Star Trek; and in the specific case of those last three, she does so in the space of a single poem (“None of the off-ship people Deanna calls friends want to hear one word about burnout. Thanks to warp speeds, faster than light, she can never get hold of them anyway. At least, that’s what they say, that by the time she reaches them, her troubles are so last year”). And throughout the entire collection, Greenbaum-Maya’s honesty and insight, always tempered with her specific brand of humor, remain on full display. There aren’t enough good things to say about this book, I love everything about it.