Ilze's Daughter

Ilze's Daughter invites you into the intimate world of an immigrant girl growing up in rural Pennsylvania. A memoir in verse, this collection of poems captures experiences of displacement, loss, struggle, first love, family, resilience. Bolster traces her family's uprooting from WWII occupied Latvia, abandoning her mother's farm, "Don't ask me./I really can't say/ if fear surged up suffocating/ mother so breath came only/in gasps/ as she climbed /onto an overloaded wagon . . ." The images and vignettes are personal and crack open a door into her world of duality: honoring her Latvian heritage and grieving her mother's losses, yet discovering a new world of delights, ("We called them the Rockies/huge boulders as if some god/had scattered them among the trees/just for us to climb and skin our knees."), the comradeship of six siblings, and falling in love with an American boy. Bolster includes an addendum, putting into perspective family events within the context of world events. Read more