GoodReads Review of Orphans by Molly Peacock
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 […]
East Hampton Local Publishes Heartfelt Verse Memoir
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 life. Ms. Handler, […]
Publisher Profile / CavanKerry Press
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 is flawless serves to draw the emotional tension of her carefully […]
An Evening With CavanKerry Poets
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 the big subjects – family history, aging parents, Irish Catholicism, […]
Gray Jacobik reviews Orphans
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 line […]
Rain Taxi Review of Books reviews Orphans
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. The lives of the Cusacks were […]
Reviews & Accolades: Orphaned in Adulthood
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.
In Defense of Personal Poetry
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 we are in relation to ourselves and the […]
Hello Again!
I’ve been asking myself why I wanted to revitalize this blog. There were several reasons for my disappearance, not the least of which was the loss of a devoted friend who was my partner when I started CavanKerry Press. Absorbing all of my focus, my life-giver in the face of this loss became my latest book, […]
The East Hampton Star
In The Dry Months By Lucas Hunt| June 23, 2016 – 11:58am Joan Cusack Handler Here I am, an old man in a dry month, Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain. — from “Gerontion” by T.S. Eliot While it is a truth that anyone who lives to old age will experience […]