For Dear Life by Jessica Dubey

Jessica Dubey’s chapbook For Dear Life is a journey into the unendurable—except, of course, the speaker was given no choice but to endure it—the fistula in her husband’s brain, the surgery that saved him, changed him and left her to understand who each of them has become here, on the other side of this cataclysm. Again and again these spare, unsentimental poems examine the unique after-life of trauma. Memories of the old life, the ordinary life—the one the couple accepted, counted on—suddenly swamped by an experience in which love, memory and identity have been disrupted. In the “cleave” poem Ten Days, for instance, the two columns offer a kind of palimpsest in which fragments of the old reality, (my lips on his/just the two of us), can’t quite hold their own amid the painful details of the current moment (dragged to the surface fentanyl free). Honest and startling and brave, For Dear Life offers a testament to love and survival.

–Gail C. DiMaggio, author of Woman Prime and Ironwork

If illness is another country, it is one in which Jessica Dubey is an intrepid traveler. As caregiver to a critically ill partner, she responds with poetry. These are missives not just about suffering, but about witness to what she calls “the other reality” of sickness. As her husband’s brain swells and his memory glitches, she sees him through her poet eyes. The penumbra of language and poetry lights the way through this difficult experience. These are powerful and acerbic poems for any reader, but for anyone who has ever cared for another, who has lost a lover to the sudden blast of illness and suffering, or anyone who has ever been ill themselves, this collection will be a home. A harbor in the storm.

–Elizabeth Cohen, author of five books of poetry, including Wonder Electric

 No one is ever truly prepared to deal with grief and pain, especially when it involves a loved one. We become scattered, disoriented, “uncompassed”, our world shattered in the face of the unknown. In For Dear Life Jessica Dubey puts the pieces back together again, poem by poem, line by line. At times heart-wrenching and at others clinical, Dubey reveals that in our struggles we come to know one another and ourselves all over again — as husband and father, as mother and wife, as poet — our roles and purpose in life redefined in the face of tragedy overcome.

–Andrei Guruianu, author of Portraits of Time