"The elegiac cityscape hard outlines of Penny Cagan's first book should not distract us from the more difficult honesties of its heart. The implicit skill and discipline, vulnerability and tenderness of these verse narratives are the result of the harder practice of finding, from memory, what we might otherwise like to forget, what will suffice. The crosshatching of her poetic detail is like papercuts, yet there is something beautiful in Cagan's humility and healing strength."

- Stanley Plumly

"Absolutely gorgeous piece of writing! Her voice as startling clarity---I truly enjoyed each poem in this beautiful collection."

- Judge's comments, Benjamin Franklin Award

Penny Cagan, a longtime resident of New York City, catches the emotions and details of modern urban life in her new collection, And Today I Am Happy. Walking through this collection of finely tuned poems are street-thug teenagers, immigrant grandparents, Isaac Singer, Herman Munster, a lecherous professor, a family, dear friends, and the millions of others working and living in New York. Seen through the quiet and sometimes lonely eye of the writer, the places and characters of New York come alive through her very personal experiences. (Release date: October 30, 2000. ISBN: 0-9661452-2-4. US$12.00)

ORDERING INFORMATION

Chatoyant no longer fulfills retail orders. To order Chatoyant books, special order from your local bookstore (supply the ISBN and specify Baker & Taylor as the wholesaler).

Learn more about Penny Cagan on her personal page.

Window Treatment

I feel you in the air today,
the way everyone can feel their dead
grandparents out there somewhere.
I feel you as I walk through Sunday streets,
past restaurants smoking from morning 
coffee, omelets, and cigarettes.
I feel you as I walk downtown 
to where passages of alleys 
are piled thick with dusty signs 
for custom-made blinds, drapes made to order, 
decorator fabrics, fine home linens, 
where you would go for covers and curtains, 
to a shop where a man with your heavy eyes 
knew the correct spelling of our family name, 
where imported fabrics brocade the walls, 
where couples pass swatches from hand to hand.

This is not the way you would have wanted
me to travel to Grand Street,
with just a one room apartment
and two sets of windows to treat.
Perhaps you were right
when you would hug me with arms
as wide as all of Russia and warn
against too much education.
Perhaps you were right when you said
that a woman can become too smart for any man.
But girls were married young back in the shtetl,
and how could you have been happy
with Grandpop never working in America,
and spending most of his days
praying alone in dark rooms?

© Penny Cagan, 2000

"Penny Cagan has written a tart and thoughtful first book---as economical and egalitarian as her name. As she says, "I am named Penny, after a single cent"."

• Carol Muske

"Penny Cagan speaks for millions of women and men in these poems about a woman who is fortyish, single, childless, an apartment dweller, a worker in the big city. A woman who faces melancholia, otherwise known as depression, has suicidal thoughts, goes to therapists, feels like nobody, like nothing but her laundry list or the contents of her purse. Smile, people say to her on the street. Are you happy, an ex-boyfriend asks. A woman who is late for work, who is almost mugged, who is cruelly teased by a poetry teacher. How is it that reading Penny Cagan's poems, I do not feel sad or depressed? The answer is her original voice, her honest, unblinking vision, her quiet humor, the realism and music of her creativity. Her poems, that say the unsayable without self pity, lift this woman out of anonymity. They lift us all---her mother, father, brother, niece, her cat, her fellow passengers on the subway, her fellow apartment dwellers. Some big city courage supports this woman. This book of beautiful poems can teach all of us about living."

• Sondra Zeidenstein