Still Life with Sorrow & Joy
Paperback
ISBN13: 9781968610227
Publisher: Poetry Box
Published: May 1 2026
Pages: 112
Weight: 0.47
Height: 0.30 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
The poems curated here are, in part, a feast of losses, but the work moves through several registers; I love that there's also dark comedy, imaginings of the afterlife, and most of all a fierce love for this world. Ayers knows how imagination is part dream...dipperful by dipperful, how the sky is a blue door that opens both ways. This is a book you'll want to hold close.
-SUSAN RICH, author of Blue Atlas
Still Life with Sorrow & Joy is a joyous celebration of both. Yes, poet Lana Hechtman Ayers laments, I can't handle another/ dead dog, / dead aunt, / dead lover, / dead plumber, / dead fly even, but even this list carries a kind of delight in its unexpected variety. Ayers has learned to carry the pebbles/ of grief in my arms / without dropping a single one. Indeed, this collection makes them shine.
-PENELOPE SCAMBLY SCHOTT, author of gOD: A Respectfully Divergent Testament
This exquisite series of poems is an extended meditation on death, loss, remembrance and transformation...We readers know that we are in the presence of a powerful sensibility, as the poet summons us to come like a clock that chimes all hours, and we must heed her voice, because (as she addresses the force of life itself) each day you fly the moon over my house / like a flag of welcome. This is a poet who can teach us how to live, with joy, with our own dying, and what better cause for celebration could we have?
-CAROLYNE WRIGHT, author of Masquerade and This Dream the World: New & Selected Poems
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