Cauterized

by Laura Apol

to burn or freeze the flesh around a wound to stop heavy bleeding. In her sixth full-length collection, award-winning poet Laura Apol returns to themes of loss that are, at least partly, her struggles with a conservative religious upbringing, her mother’s illness and death, children growing up and leaving home, losing her adult daughter to suicide, a worldwide pandemic, the casualties of age. With startling honesty, empathy, and lyrical precision, Apol offers insight into the ways some wounds need cautery to begin to heal. This is a book that will resonate with anyone who has grappled with the complexities of grief, forgiveness, resilience, and healing across time.

96 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2024

About the author

Laura Apol is an associate professor of teacher education. Her research interests include literary theory and children's and adolescent literature, issues of diversity in children's and adolescent literature, critical reading and response to literature, and historical children's literature. Recent projects include using writing to facilitate healing among high school- aged orphans in post-genocide Rwanda, and publishing stories of Rwandan Tutsi genocide for children of Rwanda and of the world. She has co-edited a collection of poetry for children and, as a published writer and poet, she conducts creative writing workshops and classes for teachers and students on all levels.

(from http://education.msu.edu/search/Formv...)

Reviews

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Laura Apol's latest poetry collection, Cauterized, is moving and beautiful, even in its sadness. Apol locates longing so viscerally: the upturned palms, scars “brined as leather,” “a daughter’s name/ brimstone on my tongue,” “shampoo and clothes . . ./ the scent of her,” “such hunger, so little bread.” Yet the poems persist in finding ways to soften grief so that it can be carried: the daughter is not just a meteor flaming out, but a voice saved in amber; the mother asks the doe “what to take over, crossing; /what to leave behind.” And the brave poems “Backbeat” and “One Magnolia” acknowledge that such deep grieving—in blood and bone—can be salved because, as the final poem observes, "everything rises, however buried.”

[Ashley · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.2