Impulse Toward Flight

Her sixth book of poetry, Impulse Toward Flight, reflects the skill of a mature poet at the top of her form. The poems in this collection blend self, family, history and community, forming an intimate autobiography. Her poems reveal how people both shape, and are shaped, by place and history. In many of these poems, Unger lays to rest past losses people, places and things that are no more. She invokes the landscape of the years preceding the Second World War in a small, ethnic enclave of New York City as well as the urban home front of the war years in the borough of The Bronx, New York. Her perspective encompasses the world of Minidoka, a Japanese-American internment camp located in Hunt, Idaho, where her husband Ted and his entire family were interned during that era.

Ungers poems are often intensely female and deal with experiences common to all women. These include marriage, work, parenting, growing older and the dance and struggle between men and women. A widely-published poet, Ungers poems have appeared in such distinguished journals as New York Quarterly, George Washington Review, The Nation, Denver Quarterly, Beloit Poetry Journal and many others. They have been widely anthologized in books by New Rivers Press, Bright Hill Press and Milkweed Editions. Letter to the Co-Eds won a John Williams Narrative Poetry Award. The Audition won an H.G. Roberts Award. The poems in this collection display the work of a master poet at the peak of her craft.