ROCHELLE RATNER

BANK ON IT

Let’s say forty weeks in the school year, at a dollar a week. That’s $40, as much as her Uncle Harry and Uncle Lou earned in the early Fifties. They were teaching banking. The kids who could afford it, which was just about everyone, brought in a dollar a week. The teacher wrote it down in their little passbooks. Did they take those flimsy books home until the next Tuesday? Or did the teacher keep them? She forgets. The point is they were learning to add and subtract. They were studying how banks evolved, how quickly some president’s face reproduced itself. But school banking stopped before eighth grade. She can’t remember just when it stopped, or if one day she and her one or two friends decided just to buy candy and Italian ice with those dollars. Really, they were introducing kids to their parents’ world. Teaching that little books like that get misplaced easily. An undercurrent warned she’d never see that money again, although maybe her parents or some other adults did. And there was supposed to be interest.
 

Rochelle Ratner's first volume of poetry, A Birthday of Waters, was published in 1971, shortly after her 21st birthday. To date she has published seventeen books and chapbooks of poetry, most recently House & Home (Marsh Hawk Press, 2003). Other books include a translation of the Belgian Surrealist poet Paul Colinet, two novels (Bobby's Girl and The Lion's Share, both from Coffee House Press), one book of criticism, and the anthology Bearing Life: Womens' Writings on Childlessness (The Feminist Press, 2000). The internet magazine, Sugar Mule recently devoted a full issue to her writing. Leah, a sequence of found poems culled from old postcards, will appear online soon from xPress(ed).

She's currently on the editorial board of Marsh Hawk Press, Executive Editor of The American Book Review, and reviews regularly for Library Journal and other publications. From 1995-2001 she served on the National Book Critic Circle's board of directors.