“One week away and the forest has changed. / Measured wind, consistent in its image. / First frost, day’s ghost, chattering red-toothed leaves.” A poem from The Maybe-Bird by Jennifer Elise Foerster.
Read MoreMy imagination wants to redeem the bareness of fact,
so I imagine the field he dies in as a place we might
have picnicked, imagine wind entering his clothes
and leaving again
Read More“…the only remedy is to resolutely abandon the larger for the smaller field, to narrow one’s vision to one’s pencil, and do the small thing closely and deeply rather than the big thing loosely and superficially.”
Read More
I’ve never read a collection of poems that so saliently addresses a life lived with a disability, in the shadows of medical intervention both the ones that linger behind you and the ones that are cast ahead of you, and how the scared body in pain exists in this beautiful and terrifying world. I cried over my coffee more than once as I read these intimate letters between Molly McCully Brown and Susannah Nevison because I found echoed there my experiences, for the first time in literature not found in an obscure medical study found in the Google rabbit hole after a night of pain keeps me awake and wondering why and how I got there and if I am alone with it. I’m not. I have these overheard conversations, like clues toward an answer.
Again and again, came to mind the image of sea glass. Broken, ragged, sharp, raw, but through the tumble of waves something beautiful, smoothed, a story in its own right. These poems were the waves, I am the broken bit of glass from a bottle.
At any point while I am reading (always in my home these days) there is most certainly a basket of clean laundry within reach waiting to be folded and put away, a cup of coffee going cold, an old water cup nobody will claim and take care of, and classical music rasping from the old radio, a sound that has been the backdrop of my life for as long as I can remember and is now the backdrop to my children’s lives.
Revising the Storm by Geffrey Davis is a study in what bruises we bring to love. A study in how we stumble forward trying to gain our footing, sometimes falling all the same, but always, it seems, with a nearby hand outstretched, helping us to our feet. This book is a study in grace and tenderness, grown in the shadow of pain and grief—for where else can grace and tenderness grow?
It is an honor to be invited into the intimacy of these poems.
