Narrative temaer: død, sorg, tab

In this debut chapbook, feline companions, nature, and imagination help the poems' protagonist and readers navigate different ages of loss by being mindful in the search for refuge. Better Living through Cats takes readers on a transtemporal excursion to meet ancestors, reflect on childhood, and face middle-age responsibilities. Throughout the pages, cats interact sweetly with each other and their humans. Some help quell anxiety and depression; others sit with grief. As metaphors for a range of human emotions, cats pad alongside generations of family members. Joy, fatigue, grief, awe, anticipation, and hope spring from the poems. When conditions pass from house to home as inherited culture, how can one negotiate the past and continuous change for better living? The poet escorts readers across the U.S. from Southern roots to a Midwest stopover to pine-filled Washington State. History unfolds in poetic lines as the author's language forges through troubled dreams to metered visions, contemplates gardens and woods, and searches to transgress constraints. A hopeful arc points to living fully by polishing one's essence-whether out in the world or at home with a cat. The chapbook's themes feature memory, place, home, agency, and resilience, all of which are central issues in author Clark A. Pomerleau's creative writing and historical study.

Two years at an assisted living facility (as the primary caregiver of her favorite relative, a celebrated character actor) kept Judith Mary Gee at a very high emotional pitch. Following his passing, she returned to her own residence bearing a grief bordering on breakdown. Finding solace in music, dance, and various other art forms, Gee gradually resumed practice of her own longtime craft, writing poetry.Gee's work has appeared in Chautauqua and is scheduled to appear in The New Guard, as well as in the second volume of Global Insides, an anthology of work created during the current pandemic.Her poems depict unthinkable loss (of love, limb, life, lucidity) resulting from war, disease, or occupation in startling-sometimes fantastical-images.A Sarah Lawrence College graduate, Gee was a protégé of literature professor Harold Wiener, whose tales of corresponding with John Galsworthy, dining with Greta Garbo and Rudolf Nureyev, and mentoring Lesley Gore were inspirational, amusing, and indelibly imprinted on her memory. Having studied poetry with Cynthia Macdonald (Gee was her teaching assistant), Jane Cooper, and Jean Valentine, she believes her writing skills assist in self-healing.Now sheltering in place, like many of you, Judith Mary Gee offers her Edges of Wanting.

Structured like the movements of a New Orleans jazz funeral, this all-sonnet collection deals with death, loss, war, disaster, the binding power of community, and the celebratory spirit that reemerges after all. In the words of poet and critic David Mason: "Part elegy for a city and a way of life, part meditation on mortality and grace, this book is wonderfully, defiantly alive."

Louisa Muniz's debut collection is a testament to the power of healing and reclamation that follow personal family loss & longing. With her artistry of words and beautiful images she pulls us into magical, surreal & sometimes strange landscapes that powerfully transfix and transform us. Among this selection of poems is Stone Turned Sand, the 2019 Spring Contest Winner for the Sheila-Na-Gig Journal along with the poem, Last Time I Buried My Body in Silence, nominated for Best of the Net.

An aching journey through love and loss. This intimate collection explores lost love in the technological age, yearning for someone next to you, and the feeling of floating adrift in the face of lost hope. For The Quiet is for anyone who has ever loved.

A lyric leap forward from Harry Bauld's playful and passionate debut, The Uncorrected Eye, How to Paint a Dead Man peers so intensely at art that the verse becomes somehow both hallucinatory and colloquial at the same time. The new collection leaves aside the formal dance of some of the earlier work but extends the vivid and often comic explorations of art and the American vernacular. With no-look pathos and sudden jazzy riffs, many of these poems vamp on artists from Renaissance how-to author Cennino Cennini through Canaletto, Rembrandt, Magritte, the German Expressionists, and Picasso, often through dramatic monologues; Bauld also pitches playfully through fellow writers Mark Strand and Joyce Carol Oates, among others, to tap into the turbulent spirit of the moment. "Always now / it seems we look at art and it looks back / at us on trial," as he writes in "The Eyes."One figure that looms large here belongs to 80's avatar Jean-Michel Basquiat, the former street graffiti artist who shot to world-wide fame and died of a drug overdose at twenty seven. Bauld, who spends part of the year in the Basque country and has written previously about that region's complex history, is oddly sensitive to the seemingly merely linguistic tie between Basque and Basquiat. It's the voice of a Basquiat angel in "Annunciation" who says, "You already/gave birth to this flame/you don't know the name of." The painted "dead man" of the title takes on many identities: not only the poet's father but Basquiat, Mark Strand, the victims of a mass shooting--and the shooter himself--as well as each of the artists evoked, having passed ironically under Bauld's gaze from observer to observed, painter to model, creator to subject. "Art is always saying hello and poetry is always saying goodbye," reads the Kenneth Koch inscription to the book's opening poem, the punning and satirical list, "Duals in the Old West." ("The sun is always saying shut up and the moon is always whispering tell me more....")But Bauld sets out not just to burlesque and blur but to erase these teasing but finally facile dualities. This a collection that displays, explores, and ultimately fuses all sorts of opposition: fame and obscurity, serenity and violence, inner and outer experience, what's real and what's imagined. One expects no less from a poet whose own name is an oxymoron.Still, floating above the undercurrent of death-haunted discontent and loss is also a delight-the hello of art, in Bauld's case verbal as well as visual, in the face of elegy's traditional goodbye: "It's what you do after you go down/that counts," he writes in "Self Portrait as Marco Polo as Miles Davis" about the floored boxer Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight champion. And in "Cadillac Moon," with a sidelong swipe at our current political scene, the poet observes a Basquiat rendering of a car: a set of fantasy wheels that play like four-square in the hands of children who, like the seven artists who will save us, plow their fingers in paint furrows to change all the colors of today's sky, rub out the authoritarian moon and everything under it, making a holy mess and moving

Ce livre s'adresse à tous ceux à qui il manque quelqu'un qu'ils aiment.Lorsque nous nous souvenons de gens qui sont loin, ils ne nous quittent jamais vraiment.This book is for anyone who is missing someone they love.When we remember people who are far away, they never really leave us.

Lesley Clinton's Calling the Garden from the Grave explores our restless human yearnings and spiritual endurance. Pieces in this collection have won awards from the Poetry Society of Texas, Press Women of Texas, and the Houston Poetry Fest. Settings as vast as the West Texas desert and intimate as a one-bedroom apartment invite the reader to both adventure and contemplation. In these pages, the reader meets trailblazers and homebodies, mothers and daughters, lovers and loners, the famed and the obscure. Each wrestles in some way with a God-given calling. Each struggles to bloom in soil made dry by quotidian loss or past transgressions. Clinton offers a sacramental view of the world informed by her Catholic faith. No small grace goes unseen in these poems; each tiny sacrifice and moment of growth is honored. This collection brings God's numinous, intangible space of fortitude and renewal into the abundant, greening poetry garden.

A Chapbook of lyrical poems that speak to the universal human experience of loss. This collection of poems draw on the natural world to find words and images that evoke and express the exquisite and persistent experience of grief, the twin sister of profound love, whether it comes as a result of death, adoption, rejection, suicide, miscarriage, or a myriad of other different kinds of separation.

In her first collection of published poems, Ready or Not, Robin Wright explores the universal theme of unexpected life events through images and language related to relationships, love, loss, death, and dementia. This collection begins with "Fringe," a poem about teenage loneliness and isolation. Several poems about romantic relationships follow, including "Renters," a poem about a marriage starting out differently than expected but leaving the reader with hope.Other poems ignite the emotions of relationships lost. Several lead the reader through the narrator's frame of mind and feelings during and after a break-up. "What This Woman Wants," centers on a woman's needs from her partner and is a nod to Kim Addonizio's "What Do Women Want?"The collection then segues into poems about the loss of beloved friends and a beloved uncle, taking the reader into the darkness of grief. "Like This" focuses on a different kind of loss and revolves on what we are willing to do or not do as a society. The final poem features a loved one struggling with dementia as witnessed by the narrator.Wright uses accessible language and uses images that resonate with others to make a human connection."Like This" was a finalist in Poetry Matters Spring Robinson/Mahogany Red Literary Prize. The poems in this collection have previously appeared in the following: Amarillo Bay; Ariel Chart; Foliate Oak Literary Magazine; Indiana Voice Journal; Lost River Literary Magazine; Muddy River Poetry Review; Nature Writing; Peacock Journal; Rat's Ass Review; See Spot Run; Terror House Magazine; Zygote in My Coffee; Time Present, Time Past, the University of Southern Indiana's 50th anniversary anthology.

Sky gone is an articulate examination of the loss of a parent through the lens of metaphor. It moves throughout the year following a father's death. Using the disappearance of the sky as a metaphor, the author compares grief to the world of nature in chaos, and its substantive lack of normalcy, until a return to some new semblance of living is possible.

In this transitional picture book, a buffalo falls out of a child's favorite storybook and ends up living in the local library.

Consider Some Flowers presents several dualities: writer and glass artisan, death and life, reality and make-believe. This collection focuses on the narrator's grief after the death of her beloved and finding various ways to mourn. As the narrative continues, the narrator finds comfort in creating assorted plant species out of glass. The concept of preserving life in intricate detail through glass flowers fascinates the narrator and allows her to explore the degrees of loss by questioning the objectives of art.Just as the narrator experiences the five stages of grief, each flower goes through stages to be completed-from studying the anatomy of each living plant to admiring the finished piece. Reliving the events before death and the artistic process become intertwined as time goes on. These glass plants are able to live forever unlike their real counterparts. Sustaining a life, even one as simple as a plant, allows the narrator to feel a sense of control. As the roots of her glass flowers sometimes end abruptly so does life. But life can't exist without death and as the narrator exclaims, surrounded by her glass garden, she misses the beauty in wilting. In the fragility of glass, the narrator comes to understand the fragility of life and her own grief.This collection recounts Boling's own experience with grief while drawing inspiration from the famed "Glass Flowers," officially the Ware Collection of Blaschka Glass Models of Plants, on permanent exhibition at the Harvard Museum of Natural History and their creators, Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka.

Set along lonely highways, the voices within When the Body is a Guardrail are restless and searching-these poems are seeking new ways of seeing, of being, of interpreting what it means to be human. Too often we treat life like a highway, like an 80s rock ballad, as both distance and a bridge, speeding towards some vast unknown, donning knee and shoulder pads, shin-guards and helmets, learning "to pull on flak jackets" and "to tread with stealth" that jewelry "jangles like an aftermath of traps." We want to be close, create intimacy without risk, but fail. And when we fail, we cannot forgive each other, or ourselves. The truth is, we drive into the morning light forgetting that experience will change us by the time we drive home through the evening sun. Each time we change, we become a new person, versions of ourselves that are never fully erased. When the Body is a Guardrail doesn't hide from disappointment or failure, that "soft-wet empty snow already understands." This collection begs us to pay attention: to the isolation of routine and small towns; to our allegiance to beginnings and endings but not to the journey itself; to the addict inside all of us. With eyes on the horizon, we are always looking for that bliss, that Eden, that perfection, and we are always failing. However, these poems are testaments to our resiliency, because despite all our flaws, we keep trying, we keep trucking along with windows rolled down and radios blaring.

Persistence of Perception is a strange, powerful poetry collection with the heart and soul of a live spoken word album, where the records skips the record skips through underground mansions and scat-man phrases, where faerie tales curl like kittens on windowsills and drifters mend their blues. Reid's poems are memory meals for the happy and heartbroken alike. He knits tight storytelling and sticky truths with threads of magic realism, hints of Eastern philosophy. Nathan J. Reid finds a way to catch us all between the canvas and the paint with poems about dying loves, traveling character actors, Batman underwear, and film reels joined start to finish. You enter into bizarrely beautiful planes of reality by reading this book, by swallowing its thoughts and reciting the sounds. Reid brings you from adult to embryo to child to adult again, offering a hand when needed, and always moving with a sweet and forward light.

When an inland tsunami floods the foothills of a mountain city, a woman survives the inundation of her home, alone. This edgy, potent verse novel circles the scene like the cadaver dog whose work it is to search for those who are missing. Reimagining traditions of bush gothic and outback horror, Luke Best crafts a terrifying and acute psychological portrait of grief and guilt. Loss, cowardice, and trauma pulse through this singular and uncompromising narrative of ecological and personal disaster.

The poem, Welsh Mare Corralled, was named a finalist for the Orlando Poetry Prize.

This is a story told with poems about sons and fathers, how the one gradually becomes the other, starting with a dream, growing up and growing old together. It's a journey that's as long as a memory, and a cycle that never ends.

"A poet wants words" Dan Cullimore writes, . . . "to carry home . . . useful as nuts." In this, his first and only published collection of poems, Dan collects words and images made of the everyday materials around him-- clay, mud, rain, reflections, memories-and crafts them into poems that, like nuts, carry home both meaning and potential. A self-taught poet and life-long resident of Mid-Missouri, Columbia specifically, Dan draws on the natural seasonal rhythms of the American Midwest, paying attention to violets in spring, firelight under trees in the fall, the cold condensation of water on glass in winter, and the heft of Missouri mud after summer rain. These are poems to sit with. They reward careful reading with insight.Funded in part by FLP's One Last Word Program.

Threshold Delivery takes a lyrical look at how we approach the death of our loved ones - and how we confront the various thresholds in our lives. These poems guide the reader through ritual, tradition, and mystical interpretations of how and why we mourn, and how we conduct our lives after knowing grief. Though referencing Jewish tradition, these poems ask the reader to confront their own strategies and observance. They call upon pathos, personal history and humor, confronting the everyday with no shortage of joy, irony, and bafflement. Poems range from short personal meditations and anecdotal narratives to associative flights of imagination and winding explorations, replete with historical oddities and popular culture. Densely musical and voice driven, poems take the reader on journeys through personal and family history, mapping the movement of the heart and mind through life's most challenging moments. A series of poems, on the surface about Mah Jongg, look at interweaving cultural histories and how the social world affects our behavior, while asking us to consider what we inherit, what we bring with, and what we pass down, as we "draw and discard."

Grasp This Salt is a collection of poetry that seeks to explore what it means to be a mother and the complexities of trying to understand our own mother's experience of mothering us, while following the life and trial of Susan Smith, convicted in 1995 for the murder of her two young sons.Nestled inside the sins of a woman who would kill her own children is the voice of a young mother grieving multiple miscarriages while her toddler named Erin keeps playing at drowning. The young mother is haunted by Smith's crime as it's recounted by a flock of lake birds, Medea of Greek mythology, and the imagined black man Smith claimed kidnapped her children before she was found guilty. Grasp This Salt brings to light with startling urgency what it means to love another, to grieve violent death, and to bear a lifetime of guilt.

A bittersweet and peculiar exploration of love, loss, and pop culture set on the fringe of Appalachia, Where We Let Go illuminates the beauty of grief even as it wallows around in the heaviness of love. This is a bold, visceral portrait of the landscape of grief; it tackles the things we collect and the graceful and ugly ways in which we live among these objects. It catalogues the small rooms and wide-open spaces in which we live with and love each other, and it mourns the moments and memories we're left with when we're the last ones left behind.

My Father and the Astros tells the story of a girl in a family of troubled men and how their troubles affected her as she grew up in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans. Maceira chronicles, in these lyric poems, a journey from childhood innocence through trauma to survival and resilience. The book reveals the deeper effects of addiction, prison, and suicide on the family members of those afflicted, a topic not often enough addressed. From difficult beginnings, Karen Maceira has managed to earn an MFA at Penn State in midlife and has had over 40 poems, essays, and reviews published in well-known journals.