Bøker utgitt av CavanKerry Press

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.

In Eleanor, Gray Jacobik presents sixty-two poems written in the voice of former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Set against the backdrop of many of the major national and international events of the twentieth century, this famous historical figure has much to say. This collection includes poems about Eleanor's husband Franklin, her children, her mother-in-law, her intellectual mentors, and her most passionate and intimate friendships. Other poems focus on Eleanor's evolving relationship to servants, issues of class and human rights, as well as her service to the world community. Jacobik's monologues constitute a sustained imaginative work that embodies Eleanor Roosevelt's emotional experience, moral conflicts, fears, losses, desires, and aspirations. Eleanor Roosevelt was a bold and outspoken advocate for issues that are still relevant today: social justice, economic security, freedom from war and violence, and the rights of workers and immigrants. Modern readers will find much to admire, and much that resonates, in the themes of this collection. Publishing one hundred years after the Nineteenth Amendment granted women the right to vote, this collection reminds us how far we have come, and how much further we have yet to go.

In poems that range from New England to the Southwest, Without My Asking, takes its cue from Psalms 90's petition--"teach us to number our days." That biblical sense of limits--of what we can know and not know--and, ultimately, the mystery of before and after that encloses our existence is the center around which these poems turn, both seasonally and from day-to-day. In poems that attend to the events of our lives--from the deaths of parents to hummingbirds at a bird feeder--these poems work to utter "Yes" to all that happens, that "peculiar affirmative" that recognizes, as Elizabeth Bishop says, "Life's like that . . . also death."

"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 fabirc of the body--the body, which is not victim, but vehicle for love, light, and growth. It is about a ceasefire 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"--Inside front flap.

Cati Porter's mother began chemo on July 19, 2012, Cati's 41st birthday. Throughout the process, from diagnosis through treatment and recovery, Cati became her mother's patient advocate, attending doctors' visits, writing lists of questions to ask, shepherding her mother through an "inconvenient year" -- a phrase coined by Cati's mentor and friend, also a breast cancer survivor. During her mother's recovery period, Cati receives her own medical diagnosis. These poems document in real time her experience of being diagnosed and treated for a medical condition and examine how quickly the advocate can become the patient.

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.

"In his debut, full-length collection, Shaw drills down using a series of narrative poems to consider the cost (in something more than dollars) of what it takes to feed a starving public that often finds those in the service industry to be faceless and replaceable. The work here hopes to celebrate and humanize the millions of service workers as neighbors and loved ones doing labor that is often forgotten or misunderstood. Scraping Away looks to achieve this by considering the person as more than just their job, exploring complicated family relationships and the angst of a Rust Belt adolescence."--