JOAN CUSACK HANDLER is a poet and memoirist, editor, and psychologist in clinical practice. She has published three books--two poetry collections (GlOrious and The Red Canoe: Love In Its Making) and a memoir (Confessions of Joan the Tall). Recipient of five Pushcart nominations and a Sampler Award from The Boston Review, she is the founder of CavanKerry Press Ltd. A Bronx native, she currently lives in Fort Lee, New Jersey, and East Hampton, New York.
"A hauntingly moving and beautifully honest collection, Joan Cusack
Handler captures intimate experiences of love and loss and love
again in her evocative verse memoir of her mother and father.
Digging deep into her soul, she creatively transforms conscious and
unconscious moments into luminous poetry."--Bonnie Zindel, literary
editor, Psychoanalytic Perspectives (1/1/2015 12:00:00 AM)
"In her verse memoir Orphans, Joan Cusack Handler tackles the big
subjects - family history, aging parents, Irish Catholicism, belief
and unbelief, and her own impending mortality - with a fierce,
wrenching fearlessness. She creates portraits of her mother and
father that are fully rounded, alive, and moving, the central
question for the poet not "Who am I?" but "Who were they?" "Our
terrors take over pilot us through/this most shaking of times...,"
writes Handler with force and grace, recognizing that the bright
and the dark, love and the absence of love, must always coexist
with each other. Orphans is a brave, searchingly honest, and
compassionate book."--Elizabeth Spires (1/1/2015 12:00:00 AM)
"In poems that convey victories and loss in the disruption of
family through death and fear, we are brought to the jagged edges
of acceptance in this stunning memoir in verse. There is the loss
of the mother as woman who gives life, and country as the native
land that secures early memories, lending definition to the idea of
family. In poems that shift across terrain and time, we see the
beauty of an aching for life in the face of . . . trials of the
soul . . . The poems here vary in texture as they move through the
fields of forgetting and remembering . . . It is an Irish story in
that the family is Irish, and the taut strings of Handler's lyric
make it indelibly human, assuring us that life continues in many
dimensions and that love is the cradle of our eternity."--Afaa
Michael Weaver, poet & prose writer (1/1/2015 12:00:00 AM)
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