A REVIEW OF JOAN KWON GLASS’S HOW TO MAKE PANCAKES FOR A DEAD BOY

There’s no getting around it: How to Make Pancakes for a Dead Boy is a hard book to read. The cover art alone, with the child’s bare vulnerable shoulders, hurt me. And then the dedication “for my nephew Frankie who died by suicide at age eleven.” This is a true story. True in that Joan Kwon Glass lost her nephew to suicide and true to how tragedy permeates our world. Glass explores how we go on.

In “How to Pray After Suicide” the speaker listens “for whatever echo / death leaves behind” (13). The poem “Line” describes the wake where the speaker helps herself by helping others, “I greet each child, hug their tender bodies / that bend so easily in my arms” (15). In “Hard Evidence,” she keeps searching for an answer, “Since your suicide, I sometimes Google you the way / I might Google a question I don’t know the answer to.” I appreciate how Glass does not have THE answer but shares the intimate search.

In all of these poems, I felt a friend talking to me. Glass’s voice is relaxed and natural, sometimes a little funny. In “Googling the Patron Saint of Suicides” (the title already funny in a black humor kind of way), she writes about St. Rita of Cascia:

In spite of her wish to join a convent,

she was forced to marry before age 12,

endure 24 years of beatings by her husband.

He and their sons died, and she was consecrated

the persistent widow, the precious pearl. (29)

The facts are told baldly, clearly juxtaposed with the dubious accolades of “persistent widow” and “precious pearl.” I can hear the barely restrained sarcasm as I read. And just as if I were sitting with a friend, I also hear the fury.

I am particularly impressed with Glass’s endings. She sets “First Sunrise” ten hours after her nephew died. The speaker, a teacher, is at the copy machine at work, having mundane problems—“the wrong color paper in tray four” (17)—but then the poem takes a big turn to the future:

The sun had not risen yet

on that first day without him in the world.

But it did. It has every day since. (17) 

The scope gets as wide as the turning of the planets and as long as time. The reader is shoved into a new reality. I recently co-wrote an article on endings that vivify. My co-author and I talk about endings as thresholds. In this moment, Glass has stood at the threshold, swept the curtains back and let us look at a new, and in this case terrifying, vista.

Glass recently won the 2024 Perugia Press Poetry Prize and her full-length book Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms is forthcoming. I plan to read her new work, but this is the book I needed today. And maybe you do too.

Joan Kwon Glass’s How to Make Pancakes for a Dead Boy is available from Small Harbor Publishing.