Remembering Chris

Rosalie Calabrese guides us through the mixed emotions of motherhood, including its joys and celebrations, but also its thorns, which make her acutely aware, ‘Though temporarily relieved, / I dread what’s left unsaid.’ The unspoken silences take the reader on a journey beneath the darkness, where her young son grew up, married and is, ‘Always with me now … / Not in body … the last image of you / Lying in that box like a stuffed doll, / Muscle and bone discharged to science.’ With clarity, purpose, great poignancy and economy, Calabrese prays for hope and comfort, for a life and loss so profound. - Pamela L. Laskin, Director of the Poetry Outreach Center, and Author of The Plagerist (Dos Madres Press) and The Bonsai Curator (Cervena Barva Press)
Poems with a special sparkle, humor and deep feeling, sensitively conveying a boy’s journey into manhood and beyond, recalled by a grieving mother who forgets nothing but keeps her sorrow in a sacred corner of her heart. Readers can relate on all levels to these poems that depict wry wit, beauty, pain, and the exquisite emotions that life brings in the hands of a true poet. - Ilsa Gilbert, Poet, Playwright, Librettist, Lyricist

The woman you hear in this cycle of poems about the life and death of a son is someone you would want to have as a friend. She is sexual, maternal, intensely feminine, both implacably honest and fastidiously private; clear eyed in confronting the contradictions between the needs posed by a mother’s love and those of a woman in search of her own life. Because of this, the good memories can can live. - Carol Jochnowitz, Writer and Editor