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The Last Things I’ll Remember by Randi Schalet

Name: The Last Things I'll Remember by Randi Schalet
SKU: 188062
Availability: InStock

Original price was: $17.99.Current price is: $15.99.

Randi Schalet’s beautiful poems to and about her son in The Last Things I’ll Remember are “spells and incantations” to him, to grief, to herself. They are like the ones she writes about in her poem “Painted Turtles,” a book she sent to him “in the Suffolk House of Corrections— a mother searching for something to transform you.”

–Susan Vespoli, author of Blame It on the Serpent and One of Them Was Mine.

“Using devastating intimate details, Randi Schalet brings her beloved dead son alive again with words so that we can see him, know him, not just as another addict who died of his disease, but as a lively, complicated man. This book is a living testimony to all the people, and all their parents and families who find themselves in similar situations. Love and grief are two sides of the same coin, and this book honors both.”

–Alison Luterman,author of Desire Zoo and Hard Listening

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The Last Things I’ll Remember

by Randi Schalet

Paper

Pre-order Price Guarantee until July 3, 2026

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This title will be released on August 21, 2026

In The Last Things I’ll Remember, Randi Schalet writes from inside the long aftermath of her son’s death. These poems return to small, precise moments—a visit, something said or not said—and stay there, letting their weight accumulate.

There is no resolution here. The poems move through what remains: the habits of hope, the limits of what a parent can do, the ways a life narrows and continues. Addiction is present but not explained; grief is not softened or shaped into meaning.

Schalet’s language is spare and exact. What emerges is a record of attention—a mother looking closely at what happened, and at what cannot be changed.

#poetry #grief #addiction #loss #griefpoetry #

Randi Schalet is a retired psychologist and writer based in Berkeley, California. Her work examines addiction, motherhood, regret, and the long afterlife of grief. Her essays and poems have appeared in numerous literary journals.