Verse from the Village

Description

A gripping and explosive debut book of poetry about navigating the pitfalls of modern motherhood.

These Chasms in the Earth: Upheaval Poems on Motherhood, Sacrifice and Self is Cecily Stone’s story of holding her children as their world falls apart. For many women, the nuclear family becomes radioactive, unstable, and steeped in a slow poison. Stone faces impossible decisions as she cares for her husband’s aging grandparents while managing her own coercive and abusive marriage. Stone’s struggle is amplified when, in grandmother Eleanor’s later years, the once-sweet matriarch looks back on her life and realizes she has given the years away. From this realization, madness and rage erupt, and both women fall to the bottom of a chasm that seems to split in the middle of their family living room. Secrets are unearthed, a legal battle begins, and among all of it no one quite knows what to tell the children.

Through poems that are both darkly beautiful and somehow intimately familiar, Cecily Stone reveals truths often left in the shadows as she faces an uphill climb to break family cycles. If sacrifice should not define a mother – how should she become herself instead? How does she find redemption for the self she has lost? Stone maps her own cataclysmic eruption and powerful rebirth in these stunning and lyrical pages that leave a lasting mark.

So together, when the moon is burning 

new in the spilled ink sky,

we write our secrets on scraps

and throw them in the pit,

by the ash, the chicken bones,

the melted motherboard,

and the longing for leaving–

you and I are the woman 

we have become.  We douse 

our shame in gasoline,

spit out spark,

and wield these flickering lights

                                                      to write.