Pop-Up Shrines by Linda Drach

If you could capitulate to utter honesty about the knotted tangle of difficult love, you would write poems like the ones that fill this book, that demand full attention and reward only the strong. If most love poems partake of wine and moonlight, these deliver strong coffee—bold-hearted, indelible, and true.

–Kim Stafford, author of As the Sky Begins to Change and 9^th Poet Laureate of Oregon

Pop-Up Shrines traverses the complex, messy, and devastating terrain of loving—and losing—a partner through the slow erosion of chronic illness. In this striking collection, Drach renders still lives of raw honesty, capturing the emotional contradictions of caretaking: its tenderness and resentment, its quiet beauty and relentless toll. With dark humor and an unflinching eye, she explores the difficult and sacred ordinariness of shared life. Here, objects and moments shimmer with shifting meanings—grief and grace, frustration and joy, presence and absence — a glowing, tectonic landscape of the heart.

–Stephanie Adams-Santos, author of Dream of Xibalba and Swarm Queen’s Crown

“The worst part is the dread.” Yes, in Linda Drach’s poems there is certainly dread, but also splendor, wonder and unflinching truth, too. I’ve never read poems like these, so honest and probing, so unrelentingly courageous in their desire to leave nothing unsaid. Lyrically imagined and examined, marriage is rendered as never before — what is the price, the real price of devotion, of love… Her voice is completely her own, which her materials deserves and no doubt demanded. “My words are paper birds that fly away.” Please believe me, her words do take flight and take our imaginations along with them. This is an important book of poems.

–Philip Schultz, author of Comforts of the Abyss and eight poetry collections, including Failure, winner of the Pulitzer Prize