Society & Culture
Seventy-one-year-old Lucinda Watson, the granddaughter of IBM founder Thomas J. Watson, Sr. and the fourth child of six of Thomas J. Watson, Jr. who ran IBM from 1952-1971, calls her debut collection of poetry The Favorite because, she says, she WAS her father’s favorite, “the pretty one” of five daughters. But in the title poem, “The Favorite” she intimates that although she was “the one chosen to travel /on long trips and / to sleep in his room,/ while everyone else stayed home,” the relationship was fraught with fear and unhappiness. The 24-line free-verse poem segues at line seven into a dark theme that defines many of the poems in this confessional memoir: “Once, my mother dressed me up / like the woman he was sleeping with.” A loaded line that suggests the psychological abuse Watson endured from both parents. And in “Seeing Lake Tahoe” her recollection moves from remembering the brilliance of the “electric blue of the lake and sharp bright harshness of the sun” to seeing in her