Books published by CavanKerry Press

Explores the pushpull of received histories, of forces we can't control no matter how hard we try

"From Kendrick to Kanye, to a Sunday in Oakland with Frank Ocean's falsetto in the foreground, Mausoleum of Flowers is still life set against the backdrop of demise. Daniel Summerhill's sophomore collection grabs fate by the throat and confronts it. What does it mean to continue living when your friends are dying beside you? This collection melds an exploration of spirituality and rebellion with Black tradition. Summerhill's poems invite the reader near in order to self-excavate and explore tones of loss, love, and light"--

A critical look at female queerness through the lens of first-generation culture.   In Tanto Tanto, a queer daughter of immigrants highlights the struggles she faces in romantic relationships amidst a culture of oppressive, culturally sanctioned heteronormativity. Exploring the consequences of queer love in both contemporary American and Luso-American societies, Tanto Tanto unsettles ideas about the privileged queer body, romantic love, queer motherhood, femininity, gender identity, sex, and more. This collection makes visible and troubling what is often overlooked, misunderstood, and romanticized in “Americanâ€? homosexuality.

A poetry collection centered on the Korean American experience. The term “half-lifeâ€? is used to describe radioactive decay, pharmaceutical drugs, rocks, the atoms of our human bodies, and even technological products. Using this idea as a starting point, A Half-Life provides a rare glimpse into the Korean American experience. The poems utilize the literal metaphor of the highway as the intersecting point of America, Asia, and the globe, to reflect on the emotional and physical journeys many Asian Americans take. From Chicago to Seattle, from the biographical to the fictional, from current times to the Korean and Vietnam wars, A Half-Life covers the joy and pain, the probable and improbable, the individual and communal‿the cultural histories we all share.

The Snow's Wife presents a dispassionate examination of the final months of a marriage, ending with a spouse's death. It examines the daily minutiae of caregiving, both the tender and the distasteful, that lend startling poignancy to unbearable hardship. Frannie Lindsay's poems chronicle how these challenges shock both self and God, dismantling that spiritual partnership and creating a new one that seems at first a temporary refuge, but is later revealed to be sturdy and permanent. This collection explores the ways in which intimacy becomes at once tender and gritty in the face of loss. These poems investigate how we remember, and how we begin the patient reshaping of the bereft self. The Snow's Wife reaches beyond the sorrow of the poems' speaker and includes the reader in the difficult, loving acceptance of mortality. Unafraid to look beyond the sentimentality of grief, Lindsay draws an unflinching and intimate portrait of a conflicted yet tender relationship. Illustrating the strain that an expected death can place upon a marriage, and the myriad and surprising ways in which such strain expands the heart, The Snow's Wife examines the crises of faith that arise naturally during intimate end-of-life caregiving.

In Rise Wildly, poet and journalist Tina Kelley writes with precision, heart, and humor. Touching on matters such as marriage, child-rearing, and caregiving for her mother and her earth, Kelley's poems betray an unabashed affection for big words and small children. As a journalist, she has heard and told hundreds of stories, and like all reporters, values facts and the psychological heft behind them. Her mind catches on shiny facts and phrases that she gathers in combinations that can surprise, delight, and inform. Both reverent and irreverent, but always aiming for accuracy and empathy, Kelley explores the darkest corners, then lifts her eyes high. The poems in Rise Wildly touch on stories from the front row seat of Kelley's life, especially in her role as caregiver. Written with reverence for the vicissitudes of being a mother, wife, and daughter, Rise Wildly touches on it all: birth, childhood, middle age, old age, death, and their epic combinations. Musings on fact, fiction, music, nature, and family are relayed with humor, grief, joy, and adoration.

In Set in Stone, Kevin Carey's poems tell stories as dreams, as memories, as rituals, or ceremonies. Carey writes poetry for the everyperson, poetry that deals with memory, loss, and nostalgia in an accessible and honest way. These poems tell stories about growing up and growing older, about loss and victory, giving praise to the moments that pass through our lives and the imprint they leave behind. Carey embraces the mystery of nostalgia, the haunted memories, worn and cemented by time, that string a life together. These are poems of places and of people, both real and imagined. These are poems about summer ponds and barroom nights, basketball and superheroes--poems that remind us of our humanness. These are poems, set in stone, to be chipped away at carefully, revealing the truths hidden underneath.

A family built, a family lost. Truth Has a Different Shape is a story of the power of compassion, of love and loss, revelations and relationship, and the evolution of self. Growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, Kari O'Driscoll was taught that strength and stoicism were one and the same. She was also taught that a girl's job was to take care of everyone else. For decades, she believed these ideas, doing everything she could to try and keep the remaining parts of her family together, systematically anticipating disaster and fixing catastrophes one by one. Truth Has a Different Shape is one woman's meditation on how societal and familial expectations of mothering influenced her sense of self and purpose, as well as her ideas about caretaking. As an adult, finding herself a caretaker both to her own children and to her aging parents, O'Driscoll finally reckons with the childhood trauma that shaped her world. Adoption, loss, and divorce defined her approach to motherhood, but in Truth Has a Different Shape, O'Driscoll finally pushes back. This memoir tracks her progress as she discovers how to truly care for those she loves without putting herself at risk, using mindfulness and compassion as tools for healing both herself and her difficult relationships.

In Eleanor, Gray Jacobik presents sixty-two poems written in the voice of former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Set against the backdrop of many of the major national and international events of the twentieth century, this famous historical figure has much to say. This collection includes poems about Eleanor's husband Franklin, her children, her mother-in-law, her intellectual mentors, and her most passionate and intimate friendships. Other poems focus on Eleanor's evolving relationship to servants, issues of class and human rights, as well as her service to the world community. Jacobik's monologues constitute a sustained imaginative work that embodies Eleanor Roosevelt's emotional experience, moral conflicts, fears, losses, desires, and aspirations. Eleanor Roosevelt was a bold and outspoken advocate for issues that are still relevant today: social justice, economic security, freedom from war and violence, and the rights of workers and immigrants. Modern readers will find much to admire, and much that resonates, in the themes of this collection. Publishing one hundred years after the Nineteenth Amendment granted women the right to vote, this collection reminds us how far we have come, and how much further we have yet to go.

In poems that range from New England to the Southwest, Without My Asking, takes its cue from Psalms 90's petition--"teach us to number our days." That biblical sense of limits--of what we can know and not know--and, ultimately, the mystery of before and after that encloses our existence is the center around which these poems turn, both seasonally and from day-to-day. In poems that attend to the events of our lives--from the deaths of parents to hummingbirds at a bird feeder--these poems work to utter "Yes" to all that happens, that "peculiar affirmative" that recognizes, as Elizabeth Bishop says, "Life's like that . . . also death."

"Sweet World reveals a 21st-century life in the midst of an epidemic. It's not about hating, battling, or even ultimately surviving the ravages of the epidemic as much as it is an homage to a life that continues even as the illness exists within the fabirc of the body--the body, which is not victim, but vehicle for love, light, and growth. It is about a ceasefire with the disease while the soul steps up and takes the lead. Simply put, it's about the challenges and ultimate joys of one woman's life as she recreates herself in a time of breast cancer"--Inside front flap.

Cati Porter's mother began chemo on July 19, 2012, Cati's 41st birthday. Throughout the process, from diagnosis through treatment and recovery, Cati became her mother's patient advocate, attending doctors' visits, writing lists of questions to ask, shepherding her mother through an "inconvenient year" -- a phrase coined by Cati's mentor and friend, also a breast cancer survivor. During her mother's recovery period, Cati receives her own medical diagnosis. These poems document in real time her experience of being diagnosed and treated for a medical condition and examine how quickly the advocate can become the patient.

Margo Taft Stever acutely observes and describes human society, past and present. From her compelling and beautiful descriptions of life inside a nineteenth-century private insane asylum to her colorful and often critical depiction of elements of contemporary society, her poems profoundly speak to us. They describe the delicate line between the certifiably insane and the irrationality of everyday life; they depict a society sometimes harsh and ugly, sometimes soft and loving, with stunning visual imagery. Stever speaks to us about our interactions with each other and with the natural world. Each segment tells its own story that captures us and makes us think.

Drama of ordinary lives transformed into the extraordinary

"In his debut, full-length collection, Shaw drills down using a series of narrative poems to consider the cost (in something more than dollars) of what it takes to feed a starving public that often finds those in the service industry to be faceless and replaceable. The work here hopes to celebrate and humanize the millions of service workers as neighbors and loved ones doing labor that is often forgotten or misunderstood. Scraping Away looks to achieve this by considering the person as more than just their job, exploring complicated family relationships and the angst of a Rust Belt adolescence."--

From the external worlds of race and gender to the internal world of family life, taps into what is wild and good in all of us

Plunges the reader into the imagination as it fictionalizes the crushing demands of separation, loss, and artistic process

Speaks of violence toward women and girls through one family group, 1980s cultural milieu, and retold fairytale