Though my three siblings and I saw our parents as punitive and/or ineffective, it also became clear that they were far more successful building a satisfying marriage once we were no longer living with them. It’s not uncommon for relationships to improve (or collapse) once children have established their...
Joan Cusack Handler’s parents are so vivid in this memoir that they fly off the page. How often in a daughter’s memoir—here a memoir of her Irish Catholic parents, new to New York and bringing up a family in the 1950’s—can you actually feel the voices of the family? Orphans is not just in Handler’s voice,...
Sep 5, 2016 11:45 AM
Anisah Abdullah
No one is taught how to cope with the death of a loved one, arguably the most emotionally painful experience in one’s life. After Joan Cusack Handler’s parents died, she decided to explore the aftermath in her latest book, “Orphans,” and reflect on her family...
Orphans
Reviewed by Matt Sutherland
May 27, 2016
From the founder of CavanKerry Press, this delightful memoir in verse bears witness to a complicated family history of Ireland’s Troubles, devout Catholicism, fierce maternal strength, aging, death, bitterness, and love. That Joan Cusack Handler’s poetry...
CavanKerry, a not-for-profit literary press, aims to expand the reach of poetry to a general readership by publishing works that explore the emotional and psychological landscapes of everyday life. Come enjoy recent work by publisher and poet Joan Cusack Handler, “…whose verse memoir, Orphans…tackles...
Top Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Successful and Engaging Integration of Poetry and the Lyric Memoir
By Gray Jacobik on July 13, 2016
I’ve read and re-read “Orphans” and much of it keeps coming back to me whenever I’m walking or driving or have an idle moment (waiting in a security...
Orphans is now up in the Summer 2016 Online Edition of Rain Taxi Review of Books. Read the review below…..
ORPHANS
Joan Cusack Handler
CavanKerry Press ($18)
by James Naiden
This collection of poems is an extended elegy to Joan Cusack Handler’s parents, who were immigrants from Ireland....
My dual roles as poet and psychologist prepared me well to confront my own and my parents’ love and loss, joy, resentment, anxiety, dependency, tenderness, and terror. All collided in what may be considered the most vulnerable of adult life stages: when we all become orphans.
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Political poetry, the poetry of nature and the poetry of ideas have long been well regarded and published. Not so, however, with what I call personal poetry ( often mistakenly referred to as ‘confessional’ poetry) which focuses on the emotional/psychological fabric of the individual that dictates who...