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Quiet. . .The collected Poems By Sauci S. Churchill (1940-2011)

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This elegant, intelligent, and deeply moving collection of poems is aptly named. Sauci Churchill’s lyricism is indeed, quiet, and all the more powerful for it. She finds miracles in the smallest things — a tiny harmonica, a white lace collar, even the blink of an eye — and builds exquisite shrines of poetry round them. That hush in her voice reminds us that everything, seen properly, is part of a sacred whole. What a blessing this book is.

–Rose Solari, author of The Last Girl (poetry) and A Secret Woman (a novel)

 

It is good to have Sauci Churchill’s early work and later poems brought together here. Her poems have long been marked by a unique combination of delicacy and toughness, reticence and candor. The poems she wrote between her diagnosis with ALS and her death in 2011 add moments of angry humor and astonishing beauty. “I lay down/in the whitest of snow,” she writes. “later that evening/ a small red fox/ sniffs my face/ and moves on.”

–Jean Nordhaus, author of Innocence, Memos from the Broken World, and The Music of Bein.

 

Sauci Churchill’s poems are quiet marvels — this is not hyperbole. Her seemingly simple diction and concreteness of line, whether writing of childhood memories in Chicago (Running Down Division Street) or traveling in Jamaica and Croatia, or in meditations on sorrow and pain — which “like the night sky, is vast / Twinkling, it seems to come and go / but is steadfast like the north Star” — or in comic self-deprecation, the poems from one to the next have a luminesce about them: “Who’s to say on a shining summer evening/ with my planet or star ascending / and my clothes strewn about / that I cannot dance/in the privacy of /the moon’s light / just as I am / as I am.” The poems of Quiet have a singular voice — you cannot help lingering amidst their warm companionability.

–Merrill Leffler, author of the poetry collection, Mark the Music

 

 

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Quiet. . .The collected Poems

By Sauci S. Churchill (1940-2011)

Full-length, Paper

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This title will be released on June 28, 2024

This book was made possible, in part, by donations to the FLP’s ONE LAST WORD Program. ONE LAST WORD helps to bring the last works of gifted poets to the world. We are honored to be publishing her last work.
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Sauci Churchill’s Quiet . . . Collected Poems brings us into a compelling voice that is distinctive in its presence, whether joyous, sad, tender, comic, reflective, or fearful. Whatever the subject, the poems are like lyric  conversations, be they memories of growing up on Chicago’s streets in the 1940s and 50s; of the world about her — bats, for instance, “lie in dark places / our pulse pounds in fright // Help us to love them”; of religious belief — “I never had religion but/ revered the fine grain of wood / polished it with my soft rag to shine”; of travel,“ in “My First Time in Paris”: “Pont Neuf, hidden in shadows is wrapped. / Domes emerge and the city begins to dazzle;” and then of pain, which Sauci had much of and wrote about in the most evocative of ways: “Washed in the moon’s brightness / pain, like the night sky, is vast.”  And, the poetry she wrote when she was dying stands by itself, particularly her last words, from which the title of the collection comes, prompted by a trapped sparrow in her porch:  ” Quiet…. /That frightened sparrow/ could have been my heart.” The understated elegance of all these embracive poems is a welcoming invitation to share in their intimacy.

Sauci S. Churchill graduated from the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and took graduate work at the University of California at Berkeley.  After teaching and working as a law librarian for more than three decades in a windowless inner core of a government building, she retired to work at Hillwood Museum and Gardens, where she asked only to be put into the light. She lived with her husband, Bruce Butterworth, and the third of their shelter dogs, Cloud.

In November of 2010, she was diagnosed with ALS, and died of the disease seven months later on June 3, 2011.  She was cared for every moment until the end by her husband Bruce Butterworth.  Her daughter, Devorah Churchill from a previous marriage, mourned her death then, and now, as do so many of her friends whom she helped so much with her life, and her works.

This book, which begins with the works written between her diagnosis of ALS and her death, is published so that those poems will not be forgotten: Her husband says: “she faced death realistically, with unforgettable courage.  She always chose her own way, and did until the end.  I will always remember her”

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