Leavings From My Table

Beautifully lyrical and deeply elegiac, Charlene Stegman Moskal's Leavings from My Table is an exquisite exploration of the body as vessel and emotion. These poems remind us that grief is an excruciating-as "imaginary spaces shimmer, / fade in a moment's breath"-yet brilliant form of palpable love: "the empty passenger seat of my car / that still bears your shadow," "the twigs of abandoned birds' nests," a gentle note that "None of us are the sun." Moskal reminds us that our bodies, our hearts, and our minds are radiant and failing, substantial but never quite decipherable. They might be best understood as living verbs and imagistic metaphors, "neurotic pieces" hanging "marionette-like on nerve strings, on loose raw tendons," which can become strong and steady-solid as "cinder block," "fierce and protective," "insulated by structure and hope"-when we allow ourselves to exist within the conditions of profound and time-tested love, that of one's self, one's friend, one's partner.-Heather Lang-Cassera, author of Gathering Broken Light, Clark County, Nevada Poet Laureate EmeritusCharlene Stegman Moskal explores the fraught territory of grief in images both vivid and physical. "There is a hairline crack / in the bone o my heart," she writes; "my palm is an empty cavity." She mourns the loss of permanence, "an improbable house sitting in a field of sand." She knows the moments when the simplest actions become ambushes: "I open a drawer/ and my heart falls into it." Anyone who has experienced loss-and that is all of us-will find resonance in these poems.-Deborah L. Fruchey, author of Three Kinds of Dark Editor, Our Lady of Telegraph Avenue: A Tribute o Julia VinogradThese Leavings aren't castoffs or scraps as much as they are farewells. In these poems, Charlene Stegman Moskal speaks to that part of us that wonders how to keep going when so much of us-and those we've loved-have been left behind.-Will Everett, Author of We'll Live Tomorrow NPR Documentarian and Journalist