Sign-In
Cart
The Price of Breathing
Paperback
ISBN13: 9783988321947
Publisher: Vine Leaves Press
Published: Sep 15 2026
Pages: 134
Weight: 0.38
Height: 0.34 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Some loves wait a lifetime to return.
This is a tender, beautifully woven and expertly crafted story told in poems about the power of first loves, long marriages, the ache of illness, and the way feelings and actions from the past linger in all of us. Antonia Albany, author of Around the Corner, Up Ahead
Meet Helen and Harry Crawley, a couple living in the American West in 1951. A letter arrives that will detonate their everyday routine and send Harry swiftly traveling East (to Helen's protest) to visit his ailing first love, Flora, now a polio patient hospitalized in an iron lung.
What follows-in telegrams, free-verse poems, letters, and postcard text-is a timeless look at relationship dynamics, raising questions about the strength and meaning of first love long after the sweethearts have parted, the teamwork and ties that bind later-in-life bonds, and the challenges of living with chronic illness.
Will Harry return home to Helen? Should Helen accept his return if he does? Or will Harry's renewed bond with Flora prove a permanent disruption and the start of a different life for all involved?
Also from
Faith, Melanie
From Promising to Published: A Multi-Genre, Insider's Guide to the Publication Process
Faith, Melanie
Paperback
Also in
General Poetry
Dante's Vita Nuova, New Edition: A Translation and an Essay
Pitavy, Francois
Alighieri, Dante
Paperback
Sounding the Seasons Enlarged Edition: One Hundred and Ten Sonnets for the Christian Year
Guite, Malcolm
Paperback
They Bloom Because of You: Poems on the Infinite Love, Growth, and Magic of Motherhood
Urlichs, Jessica
Paperback
Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way
Le Guin, Ursula K.
Lao Tzu
Paperback