Walking BackwardPoems by Margaret StawowyRelease Date: September 8, 2023
Kelsay Books, 2023 $20.00 Available online:Kelsay Books and Amazon. Also at bookstores: Rebound Books and Sausalito Books by the Bay |
With deftness, a pure delight in words, and reverence for their power, Margaret Stawowy distills story into literature’s compelling and most succinct form, poetry. In Walking Backward, she dares to visit that borderland where ancestral meets modern, an often mysterious terrain willfully or unwittingly hidden from lives that would be elevated by knowing. This beautiful book takes us on a brave journey of excavation, unearthing a surprising past, and shows that any potential tempest can be weathered when a family stands together, strong in its truth.
--Anita Gail Jones, author of The Peach Seed
Sometimes poems are doorways, and in this case, doorways to the past. Stawowy's poems reveal the hidden and unexpected rooms of family history with grace, ease, and the unfiltered light of truth-telling. The teller never forgets that story is the container that holds and connects us all.
--Danusha Laméris, winner of the 2021 Northern California Book Award in Poetry for Bonfire Opera
Storms of the Inland SeaPoems of Alzheimer's and Dementia CaregivingEdited by Margaret Stawowy and Jim CokasShanti Arts, 2022
$18.95 Available online: Amazon and Shanti Arts. Available at bookstore: Sausalito Books by the Bay |
An affecting and expertly arranged set of poetic works.
--Kirkus Reviews
The pain of losing a loved one to dementia is life-altering. A grandmother forgets the names of her grandchildren. A daughter becomes the caretaker for her mother as her mother grows more and more confused. The story is familiar but nothing prepares one for the emotional toll it takes: contradictory, repetitive, heartbreaking, irrational, as vast as the ocean itself. The poems in Storms of the Inland Sea illuminate a subject that too often exists in shadows. If dementia is a disease of confusion and obfuscation, a dismantling of self and memory, the poems in this powerful anthology are an act of grace and remembrance, a way of bearing witness to the true human mercies we find in the face of overwhelming loss.
--Kai Carlson-Wee, poet and visual artist; author of Rail
Keeper of the PondPoems by Margaret StawowyConflux Books, 2017
$17.00 Available online: Amazon Available at bookstore: Sausalito Books by the Bay |
Margaret Stawowy’s new collection could just as well have been called Lost and Found. These meditations consider a tenuous world, vanished or fated to vanish, as though to reclaim it, to keep it from absolute annihilation. A number of these poems are gorgeous conceits, sometimes playful, sometimes painful, sometimes perplexing, but almost always executed with a sure hand and a cool eye. Stawowy guides us through the undersides of childhood and memory and dread as "someone in love / with anomaly," who is also "always grateful / for grace"—a welcome combination for the lucky reader.
--Thomas Centolella, Dorset Prize winner and author of Almost Human