STORMS OF THE INLAND SEA

An anthology of poems by professional and family caregivers of people with dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.

Editors Stawowy and Cokas have personal experience caring for loved ones with cognitive impairments. In a foreword, Stawowy expresses the editors' wish that they had access to related poetry to guide them through “difficult days of change and coping,” so they curated this poetry collection by fellow caregivers to help readers in similar situations. She notes that caregiving “forces us to give up the luxury of viewing death and decline as an abstract concept and…brings us face-to-face with its inevitability in a way that intellectualizing never can.” The poems here aim to reflect that process by taking readers through the various stages of Alzheimer’s disease and their subsequent effects on caregivers. It’s divided into seven sections, beginning with poems about the early days of the disease (“Evening Gray”) before moving into later stages involving nursing homes and, eventually, death (“Salvage” and “Salt”). These poems are harrowingly honest, and sometimes brutal, in how they illuminate the realities of caregivers’ lives. In Felicia Mitchell’s “My Cheating Heart,” the speaker says, “Sometimes, if she’s not all that very wet, / … / I check my mother out of her nursing home / without changing a thing.” The courage of these poets to discuss these difficult, painful topics is admirable, resulting in a touching reading experience. Additionally, the collection’s fluid structure succeeds in highlighting diverse aspects of caregiving, including small, seemingly mundane moments that later loom large in caregivers’ memories. Stawowy and Cokas have produced an anthology of poems that honors caregiving work with compassion, just as flowers “move us / beyond the moment / of failed memory / into the present” in Barbara Hill’s “Hyacinths.”

An affecting and expertly arranged set of poetic works.