With Our Baggage

The poems in 'With Our Baggage' remind us of the baggage we all carry and show us how to do it with grace. The range of subjects is vast, from baseball heroes to the failures of fathers, from being a poet to being Polish in South Texas, from God's radio to American machismo. But the real subject here is the human animal in its many glorious strivings and bumbling failures. The result is a vision of the world as a strange, funny, beautiful place. Though Berecka's poems are sometimes hilarious, tongue-in-cheek, and satiric, they are also painful, poignant, and bittersweet. These varied poems offer the reader a touching human response to incursions of the holy into everyday life.