Orphans

In Orphans, 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.

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.

In Orphans, a hauntingly moving and beautifully honest collection,Joan Cusack Handler captures intimate stories of love and loss and love again in her evocative verse memoir of her mother and father. Digging deep into her soul, she creatively transforms conscious and unconscious moments into luminous poetry.

In poems that convey victories and ;oss in the disruption of family through death and fear, we are brought to the jagged edges of acceptance in Orphans, this stunning memoir in verse. There is the loss of mother who gives life and country as the native land that secures early memories, lending definition to the idea of family. It is an Irish story in that the family is Irish and the taut strings of Handler’s lyric make it indelibly human, assuring us that life continues in many dimensions and that love is the cradle of our eternity.