Poet psychologist Joan Cusack Handler explores our most primitive and essential relationships – those with our parents – our aging parents – particularly the intense ambivalence that stems from the truth of their impending death.
Feelings erupt that we aren’t prepared for – those connected to the reversal of roles and unresolved conflicts that persist from childhood; all collide in what may be considered the most vulnerable of adult life stages when we are all rendered orphans.
Reviews
In her verse memoir Orphans, Joan Cusack Handler tackles the big subjects – family history, aging parents, Irish Catholicism, belief and unbelief, and her own impending mortality – with a fierce, wrenching fearlessness. She creates portraits of her mother and father that are fully rounded, alive, and moving, the central question for the poet not “Who am I?” but “Who were they?” “Our terrors take over pilot us through/this most shaking of times…,” writes Handler with force and grace, recognizing that the bright and the dark, love and the absence of love, must always coexist with each other. Orphans is a brave, searchingly honest, and compassionate book.
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