Totality

Description

Winner of our Leaves of Life Contest

Julia M. Paul’s gut-wrenching poems talk about the death of a child with clarity and brutal honesty. The collection begins and ends with images of a red leaf, one pulled away by the wind, subject to the forces of nature, and the other clinging to the “fragile weavings” of a spider’s web. These images memorialize the experience of a mother whose life and that of her son have been eclipsed by an alien cancer. They frame the context for poems that make ready for death, detailing the “geometry” of pills and the “Green waves of nausea after chemo,” and chronicling how “He curls into a comma / on the couch” or “When you pull over so he can vomit.” The grief is punctuated with memories of a “Hell Boy poster/ with torn corner” and the anatomy of his tattoos: “letters etched on the knuckles / in his brother’s handwriting / spelling out H-O-L-D H-O-P-E.” The author gives us a vocabulary to talk about absence. She names it “Bradley,” the 25-year-old son who is the “shooting star,” “luminous in the dark,” in the “new empty” where she “travel[s] to the edge of his last breath.”

– Kathleen Hellen, Leaves of Life Contest Judge, author of Meet Me at the Bottom and The Only Country Was the Color of My Skin