“Honey, I’m Home.” Nathan Graziano. ( sunnyoutside PO BOX 441429 Somerville, Mass. 02144) $5. http://www.sunnyoutside.com

Nate Graziano’s poetry collection “Honey, I’m Home,” published by Somerville’s small poetry press “sunny outside,” is by a poet who appreciates the value of family and love, but does not fall in the trap of Hallmark verse to celebrate both. Graziano’s poetry smacks of authenticity, examining the beauty and the welts of relationships, kids, ex-girlfriends, etc...

Graziano doesn’t take himself too seriously, and generously pokes fun at the posturing and pretensions he affects, like the rest of us sad sacks. In “Remember Our First Apartment,” Graziano captures a common experience for many of us: the long-ago, gone-to-seed apartment, we started out with. Here, Graziano gives us a straight-no-chaser account of two rather unsavory fellow residents of this dive of an apartment complex:

“Julia the fat woman without a job, who lived in an apartment beside us, / stood on her front porch, / with a cigarette dangling between her lips, shouting out the/side of her mouth/at Dorothy, the fat woman without a job/ who lived in the apartment above us/ Julia told Dorothy to: “get off her fat ass and move that shitbox car,”... Dorothy then called her a “skanky-ass fat ho,”/ and told her to “come off the porch and say that sh-t to her f-k face.”

At the end, the perceptive poet’s wife tells him: “Pay attention, honey. /There’s a poem in this.”

A haunting poem appropriately titled: “The Ghosts of Ex-Girlfriends,” depicts the spectral love-objects from our past that appear from time to time:

“I swear I saw her pumping gas/ beside the silver hatchback she drove... Another time she was a shadowy figure/ in the corner of a Greek restaurant / looking at me through a martini glass/ then disappearing behind a plastic menu./ I don’t think it’s just me who sees/ the ghosts of ex-girlfriends/ It’s anyone who can still hear/ muffled sobs from the bedroom/ during the quiet moments of morning.’

Graziano, who is a resident of Manchester, NH will be reading at “The Somerville News at Toast Poetry Series,” Toast Longe70 Union Sq. Somerville, Mass. On the second Sunday in Jan. 2006 3PM.

Doug Holder/Ibbetson Update/Somerville, Mass./Sept.2005