Narrative temaer: død, sorg, tab

Brother Sleep is a collection of grievances through which a speaker mourns the loss of a brother, grandfather, and a sense of self as they navigate a landscape of desire marred by violence against queer and Mexican people.Set in the border cities of El Paso, TX, and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, these poems navigate the liminal space between language and silence. As the poems grieve the loss of family, the violence perpetrated against queerness, the bodies lost border-side, and the cruelty against tenderness, Amparan's words bloom in evocation. Reflecting on lovers, friends, family, classmates, and others of impact, they navigate personal reconciliation in response to imposed definitions of their personhood.These poems evoke an equal sense of sorrow and tenderness amidst a complex landscape of the self.

This beautiful collection illuminates the poet's journey from girlhood to widowhood. "Still, Papa, somehow you conveyed to me/quiet is where you go to get soul things out" she writes in "Tough Guy," a childhood memory poem. In "Catbird," the title poem of the book, humor interrupts grieving..."I loved her once/when I saw her lipstick hidden under the pillow./Like Marlene Dietrich in "Dishonored,"/applying lipstick before the firing squad,/no pale mouth would greet eternity."/Barbara Alfaro's poems have appeared in various journals including The Blue Mountain Review, Variant Literature and Poet Lore.¿

In her 4th poetry chapbook, The What of Underfoot, Julia Blumenreich continues to explore through striking painterly images, original forms and direct address the effects of grief, loss, abuse, world politics and the relationship of nature to our lives and the lives of children. There is great sorrow at the death of her husband from a long illness and the unexpected suicide of her only sibling, a brother.There is great love and respect for the 4th graders she's taught for over 30 years and for the natural landscape which sustain her. Read these 27 richly lyrical and image-laden poems and be transported to another approach to understanding the complexities of our world: life, death, violence, abusive parents, the pandemic, the rights of children, and the power of the nature. Her background as a painter and teacher adds an original voice to these powerful poems.

Lucinda Marshall's debut poetry collection, Inheritance Of Aging Self, explores our inherited understanding and experience of illness, death, grief, and sense of place.In poems that she began to write during the final years of her parents' lives, Lucinda Marshall's debut poetry collection, Inheritance Of Aging Self, is an exploration of aging, illness, and death, as we witness them in the lives of our elders and loved ones, of grieving and ultimately the impact this heritage has on our sense of identity and place as we in turn age.The title poem of the collection was included in the Maryland State Arts Council's "Identity" exhibit in 2021 and "Winter Beach" was the first-place winner in Montgomery Magazine's 2019 "Montgomery Writes" contest.

Though the alpha and omega of Steve Coughlin's poetry remains the single traumatic event that irrevocably unsettled his family decades ago, many of these poems demonstrate a playful, almost absurdist wistfulness, as he lauds the 1990s, cross-examines Ronald McDonald, and imagines his suave, hipster alter ego hobnobbing with Hollywood stars. In Deep Cuts, Coughlin juxtaposes poems of calm and astute journalistic narrative with laugh-out-loud poems of whimsical imagination, hoping perhaps to rectify-to rewrite-all those long-ago moments that went awry.-Cal HitzrotThese poems are chock-full of music and movie stars and the pull of the open road. They are full of the ache of longing, the piercing pain of loss, and the humor that helps us handle both longing and loss. Coughlin's writing is observant, assured, open-hearted, witty, and wise. Life is challenging in these poems, but we come away from them ready to embrace those challenges, prepared to unearth the nuggets of redemption that are surely there as well.-Brad Wilburn

Eileen Chong's luminous poetry examines the histories--personal, familial, and cultural--that form our identities and obsessions. A Thousand Crimson Blooms is a deepening of her commitment to a poetics of sensuous simplicity and complex emotions, even as she confronts the challenges of infertility or fraught mother-daughter relations. Entwined throughout are questions of migration and belonging. Viewed as a whole, this collection is a field of flowers, aflame with light.

From award-winning and highly acclaimed author and poet Maria Takolander comes her most impressive and personal poetry collection yet. Trigger Warning is not for the fainthearted, but neither are the elemental realities of domestic violence and environmental catastrophe that these astonishing poems address. Comprised of three sections, the first summons a difficult personal history by conversing with poets--from Sylvia Plath to Anne Carson-- whose dramatised confessions trigger Takolander's own. The second part remains focused on the domestic, while redeeming that scene of trauma through a reinventing wit. The final section of this extraordinary book turns its attention outside, playing with poetry itself in order to confront the Anthropocene and the final frontier of death. This is poetry that balances ruthlessness and lyrical beauty; poetry alive to its time and audience; poetry not to be missed.

Poet Brenda Nicholas believes her regular yoga and meditation practice has healed her anxiety and periodic depression by calming her nerves and keeping her centered and energized, helping her maintain a peaceful outlook in the face of everyday stress. She shares her beautiful and inspiring yoga poetry in her debut collection. If you teach yoga or simply do yoga at home on your own, you may be looking for inspiring words to share with your class or to meditate upon before beginning your practice. Reading yoga poems before or during a yoga class is an excellent way to invite a calm, soothing, reflective mindset. This, in turn, helps relax and prepare the body for the many benefits of deep stretches and asanas in a yoga class.

Mid-Bloom is one woman's exploration of grief, illness, and survival as she faces a breast cancer diagnosis. Having lost her mother to cancer two decades prior, author Katie Budris is forced to confront that loss again as her own treatment unearths a deep longing to connect with her late mother. Through a loosely chronological structure, these poems invoke nostalgia through childhood memories and use nature-centered imagery to guide the reader through some of her most difficult experiences. Described by Abbey J. Porter of Mad Poets Society as "accessible poems... with a quiet ferocity," Budris taps into the difficult realities of adulthood and mortality we all must face.

Do, please, check out the final stanza of "Flutter" for a nutshell demonstration of sound gorgeously orchestrated in language, or look at the sly echo of "things" and "rings" (with its diminuendo in "tightening" a few lines later) in this collection's first poem. But I don't want to imply that This Bony Cabinet is just one long tone poem. Billy the Kid awaits you here, and the architect Louis Sullivan, and the three major icons of twentieth century physics/cosmology, and ¿¿¿ well, maybe the heart of your own bony cabinet is knocking inside these lines too. Enjoy! -Albert Goldbarth, two-time winner of the National Book Critics Circle awardThe terrain of the poems in Kim Horner McCoy's This Bony Cabinet includes roadside memorials, architectural monuments, and Interstate mileposts along a lightly-peopled diagonal between Chicago and eastern New Mexico. Birds frozen in sculpture, the shock of world events rattling the order, a way woke coyote tale, F5 tornadoes, weaponized airplanes falling from the sky, coiled rattlesnakes beside the trail-McCoy writes with lithographic remembrance, cataloguing unexpected detours, missing sections of map, and the lingering effects of disasters-both personal and collective-in her journey through early 21st Century America. -George Frazier, author of The Last Wild Places of KansasKim Horner McCoy writes from her soul. The poems in THIS BONY CABINET reveal an ear for language and a voice all her own. A mesmerizing debut. -Johnny D. Boggs, eight-time Spur Award winner

Where Things Are, the debut collection of poems by Joan Gibb Engel, oscillates between the present and the remembered-in the poet's own words, "the beloved dead keep company with the living." 'Things' include objects quotidian and eternal-an accumulation of kitchen gadgets and the rich lives of former fishing families; plants, persons, and places that hold eternal meaning but are visible only in remembrance. With stereoscopic vision, the poet chronicles ageing, illness, separation, death, and social change while affirming "beauty, art, and truth among life's wonders." Engel ponders the ruin of ancient cultures: "stories told in moonlight told no more" and the changed nature of cities: "streetwalkers' beat: decanters now." She values the companionship of children as when she and a granddaughter pick blueberries and she celebrates "lifetime memberships" among persons no longer living. The past is both a confessional of "bloodied trap lines" and "the sacred music of our ancestors," while the present is both "dropping like flies" and hearing again "the clear whistle of birds." In the words of poet Randall R. Freisinger, Engel's poems "offer depth of vision at a time when we so badly need it."

How does one navigate guilt, grief, and loss? The poems in Ghost-Mother explore how to remember and to honor a mother as she declines due to illness and eventually dies.

Judith's poems are close to the bone, earthy, organic. As they acknowledge grief, loss, suffering, they elevate and transform it. From coal, comes the diamond. From loss comes the light. -Jan Phillips, Author, Speaker, Artist and Activis"In the Geography of Loss, Judith Prest reminds us "Sometimes it takes /a dark day/ for me to find/ my own light", as she maps those departures folks both must endure and overcome as best they can. Great aunts, both parents, a beloved dead grandmother whose spatula goes missing and creates an absence memory fills. Despite death's "discordant notes," we go on these poems say, it is what we do as human beings, until even "Beneath the now, outlines of ghost trees stand sentinel, bear witness." -Sean Thomas Dougherty, author of The Second O of SorrowJudith's poems speak elegantly yet simply about loss and life and love. Her poignant words about her personal experiences tap into the universal experience of what it is to be human, to connect, to love, to lose and to carry on. Held in her words, one can feel deeply, perhaps cry, maybe laugh, and most certainly be changed. -Trish Ford, Hospice Medical Doctor

In the chapbook epigraph, Diane R. Wiener's Flashes & Specks invokes Walt Whitman: "The doubts of day-time and the doubts of night-time-the curious whether and how, / Whether that which appears so is so, or is it all flashes and specks?" Whitman's phrasing opens the door to a broad variety of poems that offer themselves as flashes and specks.The collection creates a cross-temporal landscape and waterscape of intermittent and overlapping themes, including friendship, familial alliances-both chosen and sanguineous-ecology, ephemerality, and equity. These themes co-mingle with and manifest via elements of irony, play, magic, and fantasy. The poems employ whimsy and seriousness simultaneously.Climate change, life at home, and myriad animals and other beings in nature center-and are centered by-the collection's orientation toward memory, mysticism, and hylozoism. While interpretations are always up to the reader, the poems are underscored by neuroqueer sensibilities. Contemporary local and global events, including social violence, oppression, and wildfires, are exposed through wordplay and metaphysical approaches toward cerebrality, emotional variance, and matrix-like thinking.Like the steampunk watercolor and ink chapbook cover by artist Lucy Wales, a new world is imagined in these poems that fuses with while separating from its own past. On both personal and macro-level scales, mourning and honoring the old accompany hoping for the new; cautious optimism engages with critique, to suggest not nostalgic but reflective concurrent truths in a fragile present and plausible future. Society, family, and self are described in a context where nearly everything is or might be welcomed-except fascism.Erasing while underscoring distinctions, centering Crip consciousness and Disability cultures, and believing in the possibility of sentience everywhere, the poems range from koan-like to lyrical narrative in the context of a time imploded by political crises, social unrest, a global health emergency, and the changing of the guard.

Learning to Sleep in the Middle of the Bed got its title before the collection of poems came together. Through poetry, Alexis Cameron Stark wrote her way through difficult and uncomfortable emotions and experiences from her first-year post-grad. Growing up in Metro Detroit, Michigan, Stark took her first leap towards independence by attending the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities at Michigan State University, before moving to Grand Rapids in 2019. Learning to cope with life changes and starting over is challenging and requires familiarity with identity and life goals. Accepting the light and dark parts of herself proved to be a cathartic first step. Learning to Sleep in the Middle of the Bed introduces readers to a quirky, introverted poet, who comfortably shares her struggles with forgetfulness and the inability to keep plants alive but shies away from calling to order food or meeting new people. The author also boldly provides her opinions on her mom's ugly knit sweater in "My Mom's 90s Sweater" and the social construct of gender norms introduced early in childhood with the whimsically titled "Super-patriarchal-color-me-heteronorma-docious." Lighthearted and imaginative poems move into a darker middle, where the poems begin to grapple with a lack of control in "Intuition" and "Red Light, Green Light." "Mantra for Recovery" was inspired by the inmates of the Richard A. Hanlon Correctional Facility, where Stark facilitated writing workshops alongside students from MSU's Residential College in the Arts and Humanities. The collection's title poem "Learning to Sleep in the Middle of the Bed" confesses Stark's commitment to healing and coping with anxiety through therapy. Alongside her therapist, she processed heartbreak, "Trust Issues," and a new job in a new city. She leaned into her faith along the journey, as described on "Serenity Prayer," and to her physical strength through weightlifting, in "Church in the Wild." The collection concludes with the author's musing on writing her legacy and how she wants to be known as a writer. Poems from this collection have also been featured in the East Lansing Art Festival Poetry Press.¿

In the crowded future is welcome company in uncertain times. From them a voice emerges, that of a fellow friend and traveller bending the reader's ear. These are poems for the non-poet and poet alike, offering a glimpse into the crowded future. Gurland is a student of Seamus Heaney and his influence shows. The poems in In the crowded future entice with their short forms and familiar, often conversational, tone. They frequently surprise, are wryly humorous, and leave the reader with more then they came for. They have also been described as deceptively simple. The poems resonate, revealing the extraordinary lurking just below the surface of the seemingly ordinary. David Daniels, former editor of Ploughshares writes: "When I first read these poems, I almost laughed out loud at how good they were-how true and brilliant and natural and honest. And how they could also have gone terribly wrong-but didn't. Time and again, I had the same reaction as I realized that Greer has found her way to a very special achievement. I believe this collection will reach a wide and grateful audience, and I'm honored to count myself among the grateful and to have been a witness to the beginning of an important career." Gurland earned her degree in English and American Literature and Language from Harvard College in 1991. Lucie Brock-Broido selected her to receive the Academy of American Poets Prize for Harvard College. Gurland attended Harvard Law School graduating in 1994. She then spent time raising a family and eventually advocating for children with special needs. During this journey, she discovered that writing remained an indispensable tool for forging meaning in the small moments that shape our lives, and for recording our humanity especially in times of uncertainty. Writes Michael Blumenthal, former Director of the Creative Writing Department at Harvard, "The quiet wisdom in these poems, their serenity in times of turbulence, can help us return us to the peacefulness we all seek, and so often find it difficult to achieve." In 2017, Gurland won the Baumeister Creative Writing Scholarship from Fairleigh Dickinson University where she went on to earn her MFA in Poetry in 2020. Finishing Line Press published her debut collection It Just So Happens...Poems to Read Aloud in 2018. The volume won national acclaim including Human Relations Indie Book Award Director's Choice Award 2018 Life Experiences Book of the Year. In the crowded future is Gurland's second volume of poetry. Gurland's themes suggest that she is a humanist in every sense of the word. By reading her work, one feels more human, at least more connected to the poet, and in a way that feels intimate, honest and ultimately, important. The crowded future seems brighter because of these poems. Lost human connections these days call for poems that instill the essence of humanity. These poems, like parables, each offer a glimpse into the future when society re-emerges forever changed.

In her exploration of the multiverse theory, Alvarez deals with several griefs created by the loss of two pregnancies, a beloved granduncle, her infant son, and finally her father, in the span of just four years, by constructing multiple alternate realities in which one or more of these people survived. In this process, Alvarez deals frankly and sometimes even starkly with death and its consequences on individuals and families. The book directly addresses the questions that plague many people who grieve: What if I had done this instead of that? Would it have mattered? Is there such a thing as fate?The topic of family and loss is a natural one for Alvarez, whose family emigrated from Cuba after the communist revolution, leaving all that they had ever known and loved behind, counting on the gamble of a better life in the United States. Like many immigrants at the time, they spent four years in Spain, where Alvarez was born, before moving permanently to Miami, Florida, where Alvarez still lives. This part of Alvarez's past informs a string of poems set before the main event of the book, the death of her son. The main string of the book's narrative is memoir; Alvarez suffered a miscarriage in 2016 that she explores briefly in a few poems (all the poems are titled "versions" numbered according to the narrative string they belong to). In 2017, she lost her beloved granduncle, Arturo, a grandfather figure. In 2018 she gave birth at just 27 ¿ weeks to twins, a boy named after her uncle and a girl. Thought it seemed at first as if her "micro preemies" were doing well, Arturo died of sepsis just twenty-six days after being born. She would spend another 66 days in the NICU until her daughter, Sara, was safe enough to bring home. A year later, her father was diagnosed with Alzheimer's and then died unexpectedly of a heart attack. This real timeline is woven into alternate timelines where some of these people survived or never existed, begging the questions, What if? and Why?The poems are written in narrative style, bypassing the opportunity for pathos such a storyline might involve. Alvarez's language is sure-footed and unflinching, not unwilling to delve into the darkest parts of memory and desire. The narrative strains are woven in such a way as to have the poems speak to one another instead of following chronology, yet the reader could tease each narrative string out of the braid using the poems' titles, providing two ways to read the book. Whichever way the book is read, however, it reinforces the themes of the importance of family, the longing for reconciliation, and the questioning of faith. The book's darkness is tempered by its never-ending supply of hope, in the form of the alternative narratives each of which is a version of the poet's life untainted by fear and loss.

The deeply personal poems of A Statistical Study of Randomness tell stories of quarter-life crises, nation-sized injustices, and worlds of feeling, all through the lens of "random" statistics. From the loss of a loved one to cancer, to exploration of cultural identity, slices of life in a pandemic, and addressing America's laundry list of issues, A Statistical Study of Randomness doesn't shy away from experiences that cry out to be shared.

At times somber, but brutally honest, Nomads on a Barren Plain: Poems on Life and Loss examines dying and grief through the lens of individual moments, both illusory and real. In this collection, Michelle Spaw draws on historical events and personal experience to ponder what happens after we die, and the journey taken by both the soul and those left behind after the passing of a loved one.Vivid descriptions include otherworldly imagery: a Viking ship set ablaze, the cave of a shaman, hieroglyphs in a pharaoh's tomb. Selections such as "History" and "Tending Grief" discuss memories and mourning in the more down to earth settings of a garden and a field of playing children.An artist and designer by trade, Kansas City native Spaw never intended to write a collection of poetry. Shortly after the sudden death of her husband, she turned to painting as therapy to work through her loss, but when a friend suggested she try writing poetry in addition to her artwork, she discovered an unexpected creative outlet and a new expression for her grief emerged.During what she calls a session of "meditative mark making," a type of channeling occurred; thoughts and phrases came forward in unforeseen ways, an alternative emotional vocabulary, as if the layering of paint prompted the layering of words and with it, an understanding that grief (while new to her) is as ancient as time itself. Consider "Pompeii," where two lovers share a final glance, and "The Mariner's Widow," written from the perspective of a woman standing on the deck of a ship, trying to comfort the ghosts of sailors, men who perished in a naval disaster.Other offerings are more personal in nature, as in "Forget Me Not," a bittersweet homage in remembrance of her husband, with a subtle nod to his fondness for novels, and "Reunion," where she imagines the spirits of her parents meeting again on the other side after many years apart.However dark some of the subject matter appears, Spaw recognizes a certain light within the pain, as in "Forgiveness," where she shares her belief that no event, however traumatic, is completely one-sided. Strength can come from suffering, an almost-magical power lurking beneath the surface, waiting to be discovered and used like a talisman. "Transition" and "Hourglass" provide the reader with Spaw's reflections on her own passing and eventual resting place, where she conveys acceptance of life's journey and the natural course of events.Influenced by a variety of writing styles, including Daniel Ladinsky's translations of the works by 14th century Persian poet Hafiz, Spaw employs a minimalist approach with storytelling, using short verses and contained language that often reveals a spiritual and impressionistic tone.Ultimately, Nomads on a Barren Plain: Poems on Life and Loss encompasses more than observations about loss. It is about letting go of the past, not only of those we have loved, but those who have hurt us, and finding a way to honor and appreciate the lessons we have learned, the paths we have walked, and the things that make us who we are.

Carey Link's most recent poetry sequence, I Walk a Frayed Tightrope Without a Safety Net, a finalist in the 2019 Blue Light Press chapbook contest, is a personal, introspective exploration of the experience of living and coping with metastatic cancer. In the book, Link reflects themes of love, perseverance, and coping with mortality. In these poems Link expresses an appreciation for life, communicating to readers that they are not alone in facing adversity.The epigraph for "My Time," final piece in I Walk a Frayed Tightrope without a Safety Net pays tribute to Walt Whitman's Song of Myself. Poems from this collection have appeared in Birmingham Poetry Review, Hospital Drive, and Poets Speaking to Poets: Echoes and Tributes.