Perhaps the prosaic intimacy of In Her Strapless Dresses provides the reader with a kind of set up for the later poems. It is as if you were made to relax, to take in the simple and quite basic house chatter of the earlier poems, so that you would be receptive, open to the intensity of the later ones. In any case, the two books work well together; the second set serving as a foil to the simplicity of the first. There are times when the poems seem to go on too long, as in "For Mindy", when the point and its meaning has already been made clear by the first page, or when the poems really don't work as poems at all, which is a large proportion of In Her Strapless Dresses, which work more like brief prose pieces. Taken together, however, and for anyone interested in the horror of the Holocaust, or in some sense of what it means to be a modern Jew, these poems make for good, engaging reading.
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