In her acclaimed collections Happy Family and Music Minus One, Jane Shore traced her life from childhood to coming of age to parenthood. Now, in A Yes-or-No Answer, Shore etches the persistence of the past in a life that has moved into a mature new phase as a member of the baby boom generation. Recalling her Jewish childhood in New Jersey, living in the apartment above the family's clothing store, Shore lovingly imagines her parents, now gone, reunited with relatives over a Scrabble board in the afterlife. The poet's teenage daughter sorts through the "vintage" clothes of her mother's own hippie days. Cherished items left behind -- an address book, a piano, an easy chair, a favorite doll -- continue to haunt the living.

The poems in A Yes-or-No Answer dignify memory through precise detail, with a voice that will resonate for a generation at a crossroads.