Left-Handed Poetry by Linda Lamenza

Linda Lamenza’s Left-Handed Poetry traces an arc from accident to acceptance in a struggle to understand the good people who rush to reduce harm. A motor vehicle does the damage (“my DNA / forever embedded / in her bumper”) and the author’s body (“my broken foot / my elbow”) goes from brokenness to wholeness. The ongoing trauma provides plenty of sharp observations about loss, human suffering, and the will to reclaim health. From her care team “binge-watching me like Netflix” in the hospital, to “Ode to the Commode” no longer needed at home, to moving about with “gait crutch-uneven,” Lamenza finally has the impetus to walk again. Here is a four-year journey of “relearning to function.”

— Richard Waring, Editor at New England Journal of Medicine, author of What Love Tells Me

In short poems and terse lines, Linda Lamenza captures the shock of calamity, as well as the grit required by an arduous recovery. Yet her droll humor also peppers her writing. As close friends and family sit with her in the emergency department, she observes, “They sit in chairs….binge-watching me like Netflix.” In this honest and heartening collection, Lamenza’s words pierce: the lengthy rehabilitation, the distance implicit in her mother’s babbling, the inevitable absence from her daughters’ lives, and her ineptness at employing eating utensils on date night. From it all, Lamenza offers a lesson in “On Rainbows”: “To see one/ you must turn/ your back/ to the sun.”

–Dianne Silvestri, MD, author of But I Still Have My Fingerprints, www.diannesilvestri.com

Asphalt. An ambulance. Acorns.

All here, braided together and, at times burning. This tender yet fierce collection of poems by Linda Lamenza exposes the power, staying and changing, of everyday objects and practices in a life. But what happens when life, in an instant, shatters?  Lamenza’s offerings prompt wonder about what it means to be both broken and open. The traumatized, strong and tenacious wounded body and soul guide the way here.  And the result, with the help of this fresh voice and poet’s eye, is Left-Handed Poetry.

–Kathy Curto, author of Not for Nothing: Glimpses into a Jersey Girlhood, www.kathycurto.com