Whether she’s revisiting fraught scenes from her past with wry humour or facing them down deadpan, Adele Graf infuses whatever she touches—bric-a-brac, childhood haunts, or stricken relatives—with a vividness that places them stage-centre. Charting a memorable path through several generations of family upheaval and continuance, she evokes her grandmother’s New Jersey milliner shop, her father’s tragic early death, and her own journey to late-life plenitude with a sharp eye for the waystations that lead from disillusionment to delight.

math for couples is a warm and playful debut collection. You can feel the pleasure Adele Graf takes in the words she juggles and the forms she explores in this very intimate adventure.

Adele Graf’s poems explore the inner worlds of family, including grandmother, father, mother, husband, childhood self and aging self with an openness and honesty that is stunning, using her pen as both scalpel and microscope. A master of slant rhyme, she is also unafraid to experiment in the far reaches of poetics; and you’ll never think of popcorn in the same way again.