Digging Through The Bones by Christina Ruotolo

Digging Through the Bones exudes lyricism and brevity inside of the exploration of loss that expresses emotion through tight succinct forms without melodramatic sentiment. This collection of poetry sifts through the refuse of grief with surprising candor entangled with a musicality that offers comfort in its downpours. Christina Ruotolo’s poetry is accessible, straight from the heart, strategic and purposeful, surveying the sweat on a grandmother’s brow or the fresh remnants of ashes but always polished, steady, and pointing inward.

–Jaki Shelton Green, North Carolina Poet Laureate

Christina Ruotolo’s debut collection Digging Through the Bones explores grief and loss through poems that call back loved ones even as life moves on. In the title poem, Ruotolo writes “but there is still digging/I am not done finding you”, and on the following page, the next poem ends “to return to this home/that no longer know any of our names.” This is grief as shapeshifter (another poem’s title), as the unwanted visitor that comes to everyone’s home eventually. Grief remakes our inner worlds as much as it does our outer landscapes, and Ruotolo knows this truth because she’s lived it, is living it still. Her book is a wonderful companion for all of us out here humaning.

–Malaika King  Albrecht, Author of The Stumble Fields

Christina Ruotolo‘s Digging through the bones is a tenderly focused poetic requiem that reconciles the purest of love and sorrow with the bittersweet persistence of the memories of those closest to her, now long gone. In each poem, she captures the essence of their meaning in her life, such as when we witness her in the title poem, “dig out of the bones, shards of a beautiful life.”

Moreover, Ruotolo deftly excavates the places and pieces that contain the lifeforce of beloved souls, such as when she finds parts of her mother’s life in the seemingly mundane–the inside of a purse. In this work, Ruotolo tenderly exposes how so much of the found remains of everyday life can embody, reshape, and preserve memory. Her persistence in preserving and honoring those within the light is further strengthened as she asserts in her poem Home that “My home has no walls/it cannot be torn down/ It’s my memory strong/ and full of life.”

Digging through the bones provides readers with a brilliant headlamp through the archaeological landscape of love, loss, and grief and provokes readers to reconsider the flexible parameters of how to continue to honor and utilize memory in order to move forward and thrive.

–Regina YC Garcia, Author of The Firetalker’s Daughter