Two Years and Two Months by Chris Reed

Chris Reed’s first book of poetry, Two Years and Two Months, contemplates the “complex and many stranded” love she shared with her mother as she cared for her during the Covid pandemic.  As her mother’s life is ending, Reed’s life as a poet begins, and we see Reed trying to concentrate on writing while her mother/muse noisily wrestles “a piece of toast out of the toaster.”  Caretaking a 98-year-old Erato is not easy. However, Reed, as daughter and poet, is gentle and resourceful, using the last two years and two months of her mother’s life to know her mother better, to reconcile what had not yet been reconciled, to give both her mother and herself comfort and joy, often through reading together. These deft and beautiful poems are a tribute to the complex and many-stranded lives most of us live.  They teach us how we might all love better or as Reed says, “communicate through the bone.”

–Lois Marie Harrod, Spat and Fragments from the Biography of Nemesis

Chris Reed writes with the emotional intelligence of a woman at peace. As she and her 98-year-old mother adjust to life together in absurd times (political and pandemic), Reed finds ways to convey of their shared history “what cannot be spoken.” Beauty threads even painful memories. In a most moving poem, “mother knits an afghan… last strand, needles down, atonement.” In the next, daughter knits a gorgeous cento (“Womansong”). Other poems have us chuckling as the duo navigates Paradise Lost and Swann’s Way, the nightly news­, the laundry and the kitchen, a stroke and the indignities of decline. Savor the slowness, graceful tone, the touches of wry humor. We need the reassurance this book offers, of love that can prevail to “the end (when) we all make a journey home, alone, fitting into that space that only we fit into.”

–Barbara H. Williams, Continuo

Chris Reed’s luminous poems are time machines taking us back through her mother’s last days during the pandemic to everything that happened before. In the emotionally charged space between the two women, as her mother “rewrites herself,” everyday miracles jostle against what “cannot be spoken.” As her poems movingly say of this mingling of the mundane and the overwhelming, “It’s what we have.”

–Winifred Hughes, The Village of New Ghosts and Frost Flowers