Search results for ""cavankerry press""

These poems address the universal experiences of death and loss, putting the complicated feelings of grief into words. Uncertain Acrobats evokes the feeling of unraveling. The central concern of this narrative is the death of a parent and the fumbling for balance a dying father and his adult daughter share. Rebecca Hart Olander’s intimate collection doesn’t shy away from darkness, but it also strives for light, which resides in music and open-hearted humanity. These poems arc across the terrain of divorce, family, childhood, coming of age, mortality, and deep, abiding love, always landing with a foothold in the genuine. A manifestation of what endures after grief has unraveled our closest bonds, Uncertain Acrobats reaches beyond the author’s personal experience of grief. This collection speaks to all whose lives have been upended by terminal illness or the loss of a beloved person.

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In Set in Stone, Kevin Carey’s poems tell stories as dreams, as memories, as rituals, or ceremonies. Carey writes poetry for the everyperson, poetry that deals with memory, loss, and nostalgia in an accessible and honest way. These poems tell stories about growing up and growing older, about loss and victory, giving praise to the moments that pass through our lives and the imprint they leave behind. Carey embraces the mystery of nostalgia, the haunted memories, worn and cemented by time, that string a life together. These are poems of places and of people, both real and imagined. These are poems about summer ponds and barroom nights, basketball and superheroes—poems that remind us of our humanness. These are poems, set in stone, to be chipped away at carefully, revealing the truths hidden underneath.

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This poetry collection explores themes of home, grieving, and kinship. With wonder, empathy, and even rage, Dialect of Distant Harbors summons a shared humanity to examine issues of illness and family. Dipika Mukherjee’s poems redefine belonging and migration in a misogynistic and racist world. “A grievous vastness to this world,” she writes, “beyond human experience.” As the world recovers from a global pandemic and the failure of modern government, these poems are incantations to our connections to the human family—whether in Asia, Europe, or the United States. Dialect of Distant Harbors focuses on what is most resilient in ourselves and our communities.

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The Snow’s Wife presents a dispassionate examination of the final months of a marriage, ending with a spouse's death. It examines the daily minutiae of caregiving, both the tender and the distasteful, that lend startling poignancy to unbearable hardship. Frannie Lindsay’s poems chronicle how these challenges shock both self and God, dismantling that spiritual partnership and creating a new one that seems at first a temporary refuge, but is later revealed to be sturdy and permanent. This collection explores the ways in which intimacy becomes at once tender and gritty in the face of loss. These poems investigate how we remember, and how we begin the patient reshaping of the bereft self.The Snow’s Wife reaches beyond the sorrow of the poems’ speaker and includes the reader in the difficult, loving acceptance of mortality. Unafraid to look beyond the sentimentality of grief, Lindsay draws an unflinching and intimate portrait of a conflicted yet tender relationship. Illustrating the strain that an expected death can place upon a marriage, and the myriad and surprising ways in which such strain expands the heart, The Snow’s Wife examines the crises of faith that arise naturally during intimate end-of-life caregiving.

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In Rise Wildly, poet and journalist Tina Kelley writes with precision, heart, and humor. Touching on matters such as marriage, child-rearing, and caregiving for her mother and her earth, Kelley’s poems betray an unabashed affection for big words and small children. As a journalist, she has heard and told hundreds of stories, and like all reporters, values facts and the psychological heft behind them. Her mind catches on shiny facts and phrases that she gathers in combinations that can surprise, delight, and inform. Both reverent and irreverent, but always aiming for accuracy and empathy, Kelley explores the darkest corners, then lifts her eyes high. The poems in Rise Wildly touch on stories from the front row seat of Kelley’s life, especially in her role as caregiver. Written with reverence for the vicissitudes of being a mother, wife, and daughter, Rise Wildly touches on it all: birth, childhood, middle age, old age, death, and their epic combinations. Musings on fact, fiction, music, nature, and family are relayed with humor, grief, joy, and adoration.

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Formally innovative poems that engage with history and the individual. In his eleventh poetry collection, Baron Wormser offers the wide range of subjects and imaginative approaches that his readers have come to expect. Touching on topics such as the Jewish resistance, Godard films, and the National Football League, The History Hotel opens the door to both political and personal histories. This collection also introduces us to unforgettable characters—we follow alongside speakers as they drive through Kansas, as they memorize Shakespeare sonnets, and as they rehearse a love affair that went south. As Wormser’s collection reminds us, the historical circumstances that touch, strengthen, or shatter a life are also key to understanding it. We all live in the History Hotel, where love, betrayal, hope, and despair go hand in hand. Showing those entangled hands is the work of these poems—poems that are alive to tradition but consistently inventive along the way.

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Poems centered on survival and perseverance in the face of long-term illness. Delivered a diagnosis of acute myeloid leukemia with a ten percent prognosis for survival, Dr. Dianne Silvestri surrenders her white coat for a hospital gown. Aided by her attentive medical team, family, and friends, she navigates the surreal world of chemotherapy, stem cell transplantation, and subsequent threats from graft-versus-host disease and serious infections of her compromised immune system.But I Still Have My Fingerprints speaks to the difficulties of “surviving survival.” With a clear eye for irony and analogy and a commitment to curiosity and truth, Silvestri writes through her struggles and victories. She gives us poems with unique perspectives, fresh images, and unquenchable optimism, in her perseverance to redefine life beyond what was lost.

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A poetic meditation on life, loss, and legacy. “So what lasts?” asks the speaker in the poem “El Anatsui.” This is the central question of Susan Jackson’s new collection In the River of Songs. Jackson is a poet dedicated to exploring the mysteries of what it means to be fully human in a world where love, loss, pain, and joy are irrevocably nested together. These poems seem to answer that whatever does last is not easily defined; maybe only the intangible qualities of heart, perseverance, generosity of spirit, and moments when the poet is suddenly anchored in appreciation for “the ever-flowing fullness of the world.” Readers will be touched by the intimate beauty of the poems in this new volume.

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Unique poems that bring history to life by weaving narratives of the Salem Witch Trials with stories of contemporary women. Set against the historical backdrop of the Salem Witch Trials, Her Kind is a book about women: women viewed as witches, women making their own choices, women fighting for freedom, women who are innocent, and women who are used or disregarded by their cultures. The lyrical poems in this collection skillfully braid together narratives of the female victims of the Salem Witch Trials with the experiences of contemporary women viewed as witches for their personal histories, their political circumstances, or for speaking out and making their own choices. A blend of lyrical and narrative poems, Her Kind celebrates women refusing the victim role and reclaiming their magic.

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In this debut, full-length poetry collection, Fred Shaw offers a deep dive into the cost of service work. Scraping Away is a collection of narrative, sometimes elegiac poems that express the point of view of restaurant workers. Shaw considers the cost, not just in dollars, of feeding a starving public that often finds those in the service industry to be faceless and replaceable. The poems here hope to celebrate and humanize those 102.6 million workers. Exploring issues of class and labor, profit, loss, and privilege, Scraping Away reminds us that a person is more than just their job. The speaker in these poems also explores complicated family relationships and the angst of his blue-collar, Rust-Belt adolescence. Poems delve into the speaker’s relationship with his parents, often using music and the world of things as a trigger to reflect and express memory. Scraping Away leans on clear language and an imagistic sensibility to bring readers into the community of restaurant workers and their inner lives. Reminiscent of Studs Terkel’s classic, Working, Shaw’s collection passes the issues of the working class into the realm of poetry.

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A family built, a family lost. Truth Has a Different Shape is a story of the power of compassion, of love and loss, revelations and relationship, and the evolution of self. Growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, Kari O’Driscoll was taught that strength and stoicism were one and the same. She was also taught that a girl’s job was to take care of everyone else. For decades, she believed these ideas, doing everything she could to try and keep the remaining parts of her family together, systematically anticipating disaster and fixing catastrophes one by one.Truth Has a Different Shape is one woman’s meditation on how societal and familial expectations of mothering influenced her sense of self and purpose, as well as her ideas about caretaking. As an adult, finding herself a caretaker both to her own children and to her aging parents, O’Driscoll finally reckons with the childhood trauma that shaped her world. Adoption, loss, and divorce defined her approach to motherhood, but in Truth Has a Different Shape, O’Driscoll finally pushes back. This memoir tracks her progress as she discovers how to truly care for those she loves without putting herself at risk, using mindfulness and compassion as tools for healing both herself and her difficult relationships.

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Sweet World reveals a 21st century life in the midst of an epidemic. It’s not about hating, battling, or even ultimately surviving the ravages of the epidemic as much as it is an homage to a life that continues even as the illness exists within the fabric of the body—the body, which is not victim, but vehicle for love, light, and growth. It is about a cease-fire with the disease while the soul steps up and takes the lead. Simply put, it’s about the challenges and ultimate joys of one woman’s life as she recreates herself in a time of breast cancer.

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Margo Taft Stever acutely observes and describes human society, past and present. From her compelling and beautiful descriptions of life inside a nineteenth-century private insane asylum to her colorful and often critical depiction of elements of contemporary society, her poems profoundly speak to us. They describe the delicate line between the certifiably insane and the irrationality of everyday life; they depict a society sometimes harsh and ugly, sometimes soft and loving, with stunning visual imagery. Stever speaks to us about our interactions with each other and with the natural world. Each segment tells its own story that captures us and makes us think.

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In the voice of three characters, Miss August tells the story of two friends growing up in Virginia during a time when Massive Resistance to integration causes public schools to close and private white-only academies to open. It s a portrait of family and cultural dysfunction, and racism in a specific time and place in American history.

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