Sleepwalker's Guide to Grieving

Sleepwalker's Guide to Grieving

Sleepwalker's Guide to Grieving is a collection of poems about loss-through the death or vanishing of loved ones-but also as we bear witness to the tragedies heaped one upon the other in an increasingly turbulent world. Shakespeare wrote, "Grief makes one hour ten", for the path of bereavement can feel endless and hopeless to navigate. As we struggle sleeplessly through our sorrows, grief is that reflection of acute and shifting distress that accompanies our losses.If grief can darken the path through loss, so can it suddenly illuminate. Harwood writes: "From a distance grief moves like any other shadow-caressing first, then smothering the light".This book is a poignant journey through loss and longing, punctuated by the dying friend whose beloved racehorse presses her head against his own..."She makes a sound deep in her throat. Grief sounds that way". In Sleepwalker's Guide to Grieving , Shellie Harwood mines every conceivable form of grief for meaning: the suicide of one friend and the murder of another by a domestic partner, the death of a man after vandals ransack his beloved beehives, a child who disappears from his room, black children murdered by vigilantes or the police, a dying sister held in a mother's arms, a lover left behind, war victims, a suffocating planet-even the poet's heart, damaged by a blood clot. To Harwood, "Something's always coming for us, / some pain we'd neglected to rehearse for." Do those periods of darkness make the light times shine more brightly? Not that we see in these elegiac, often-startling poems. To the one, they express a yearning that all of us who grieve must unwillingly share: "Take me away to the world's edge, far from the host of sorrows"-if only such a place could be found. -B. Fulton Jennes , author of Blinded Birds (Finishing Line Press, 2022), Poet Laureate of Ridgefield, CT In Sleepwalker's Guide to Grieving , poet Shellie Harwood, a finalist for the prestigious Montreal International Poetry Prize, offers a poignant journey down the dark road through grief that accompanies loss. All 32 poems deliver universal truths with fresh lyrics and a clear insight into what it means to be human. That is a mandate of art that Harwood meets with great precision and feeling." -Michael Corrigan , author of Confession of a Shanty Irishman , Mulligan , and These Precious Hours