$14.99
One of the poems in Constance Alexander‘s fierce From Cradle to Grace is tellingly titled “The Exploding History of My Family,” and in fact all her powerful, gritty portraits of pain and dysfunction might be described as explosions of family history. Like photographs by, say, Diane Arbus, they investigate aging, rage, dementia, despair in compelling bursts of language that are hard to read but harder to stop reading. And intriguingly–ironically–the book ends with a sardonically versified recipe for cauliflower salad!
–Sandra M. Gilbert, author of Death’s Door: Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve
I love this little book. These poems are startling, profound, and enlightening. They give me the shivers, they’re so plain and direct—not dressed up. This exactness makes thrilling poetry, stuff that might be hard to bear if it weren’t so funny. And true.
–Bobbie Ann Mason, author of In Country and The Girl in the Blue Beret
Constance Alexander brings light to the human history of desire, grief, and trouble. She has a dramatist’s way into the vagaries of human existence. The title poem is no less than a hymn to life and its particulars – evocative and transcendent. These are poems to read and re-read with much pleasure.
–Frederick Smock, Kentucky Poet Laureate
With a gaze that is unsparing and unwavering, with a voice that is knowing and vibrant, even when it’s tired, Constance Alexander is a fearless guide through the long shadows and gathering twilight of life. Her insights in “From Cradle to Grace” give body and muscle to the notion of “care giving” and heart and soul and history to the people who do it. No, “old age ain’t no place for sissies,” as someone once said, and neither is providing the care Alexander illustrates in her book. No gauzy sentiments here, just the clear and haunting ring of brilliant truths. It is a harrowing and exhilarating ride, like life itself, and it is a read that stays and sticks with you.
–Pam Platt, former editorial director of The Courier-Journal , Louisville, Ky.
From Cradle to Grace
by Constance Alexander
$14.99, paper
978-1-63534-639-8
2018
Constance Alexander is the author of four volumes of poetry, a memoir, fifteen plays, and thousands of award-winning newspaper columns. She is a recipient of a Governor’s Award in the Arts for her work in the media, and has received numerous grants and fellowships from the Kentucky Arts Council, Kentucky Foundation for Women, Newspaper Association of America, Ragdale Foundation, among others.
Reika Ebert –
It is a small book, but beware. This is an over-packed suitcase bursting at the seams holding the essence of fading threads of being. “From Cradle to Grace” contains 17 haunting stories of troubling experiences near the end of life of a family member. They are condensed into poems of which I could only handle one at a time. The eerie, bizarre and sometimes comical aspects of dementia, of new or life-long frustrations fly out in memories and observations as sharp as glass from a crashing window (with the sound turned off). “After all, he’d had her womb for all those years, until she felt like half a duplex rented out to careless tenants.” All conventional politeness has been peeled away in C. Alexander’s texts – unless it is cynical: “Nursing homes with names like feminine hygiene products: Shady Grove, Eden Spring, Sweet Dreams at Springdale.” An wonderful and intense read.