Born-child by Carol Anderheggen

Carol Anderheggen’s Born-Child is a bold and seamless collection of poems exploring the author’s early childhood in an orphanage and the subsequent adoption that not only shaped her childhood, but also the rest of her life as a woman, a mother, and a human being in the world. This is a book about grief, healing, survival and transformation. Through the author’s remarkable restraint these wrenching, riveting poems give us a glimpse of a world we never knew existed. Born-Child will stretch your heart, and your soul. Take it slow, and don’t miss a single word or echo.

–Lisa Starr, Rhode Island Poet Laureate Emerita

Born-Child, Carol Anderheggen’s poignant new collection is a poetic memoir chronicling the most traumatic events in her young life. Abandoned by her mother and left to fend for herself at the tender age of three, Anderheggen is taken into state custody, entered into the foster care system of 1950’s Florida and finally placed in an orphanage until she is adopted.  Am I a born-child? is the question which haunts her—the question she asks of others as she wrestles with complex emotions and fragmented memories. Forget the first eight years of your life, she is told. Thankfully, Anderheggen didn’t forget. Thankfully, she wrote the skillfully-crafted poems presented here. Thankfully, she discovers that the answer to her question is a resounding Yes.

–Heather Sullivan, author of These Onyx Hours

In her latest collection of poems, Born-Child, Carol Anderheggen does much more than one would expect in her exploration of the emotions with which an adopted child must struggle. Her use of language as a tool to link the beauty, joy and pain of the natural world to that of her own life experience as an adopted child provides the reader with an unflinching look at how resilience can only grow from hardship.

Amid the fluff and “happy endings” poetry one so often encounters, here is a poet unafraid to “drill deeply down into the water of her being,” as a line from her poem in “Passing the Torch” says. In her closing poem’s closing stanza, Carol reminds us to “take time and press it close, salt away pain Fling it high above you, crack the glass, then only then, Touch earth.” These artful poems are a gift. I urge you to un-wrap them.

–David Dragone, Editor, Crosswinds Poetry Journal