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Laura Gamache has crafted something valuable out of the cluttered household her late parents left behind: these poems that reveal the love, anxiety, black humor, and grief inside our hardest letting go.
-Kathleen Flenniken, author of Plume In Never Enough, Laura Gamache explores grief in poems that deal with the tangible objects the departed leave behind. Lucid and devoid of sentimentality, these poems have the courage to let details speak for themselves. Although the poet acknowledges “no message echoes back/from the planet the dead flutter towards,” the personal effects she uncovers –her father’s war memorabilia, her mother’s writing class memoir with a chapter titled “Unrealized Goals”—reveal new facets of their owners. “Oh who would want these fraying afghans, /unflattering photographs in cheap frames?” she asks. We want, we need these compassionate, restrained poems. –Kathleen Aguero, author of After That |
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Whether describing a high-desert juniper tree, a horseshoe crab, or sea stars, Laura Gamache charts engaging encounters with the natural world in nothing to hold onto. A wished-for communion, a “sleight-of-body” rather than of hand, is at the heart of these enchanting poems.
-Sue Standing, author of False Horizon Laura Gamache’s poems confront the physical world with a fierce intelligence. nothing to hold onto takes us under water at Alki Point, where a diving instructor magically produces a “rabbit-faced rat fish,” to the shade of a high desert juniper. There is alchemy in these poems, and wizardry. Thor’s helmet becomes a horseshoe crab, costume jewelry becomes a glass-studded seahorse. Like an accomplished painter, Gamache remembers to bring both light and shadow into her landscapes, and we are left breathless as we climb with her and turn to see where we’ve been. -Rebecca Loudon, author of Cadaver Dogs |