Can you see her, the moon? by Erika Nichols-Frazer

Can you see her, the moon? examines how we heal from trauma and grief, specifically pregnancy loss and a world that is struggling in so many ways. Can our own personal grief matter while also holding collective trauma? How can we heal as individuals and communities? How do we talk about difficult things and support each other in hard times? How do we find joy again? Can you see her, the moon? explores these questions and what it means to be a young woman struggling to build a family with the person she loves, grieving private losses while the world faces global destruction.

#trauma #mentalhealthmatters #mentalhealthawareness #poetry #reproductivehealth #reproductiverights #poet #canyouseeher #vermont #vtpoet

Erika Nichols-Frazer (she/her) is the author of the memoir, Feed Me: A Story of Food, Love and Mental Illness and the poetry collection, Staring Too Closely. She holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her work has been published in various journals, including River Teeth’s “Beautiful Things,” Gone Lawn, Emerge Literary Journal, and others. She lives in Vermont.

“In compelling and deeply moving poems, Erika Nichols-Frazer has crafted a collection where the private experience—of desire and longing, pregnancy and loss, hope and despair—is set alongside environmental disaster and the vastness of the human, global experience. Can you see her, the moon? poses questions to the reader—“How will I heal?” together with “Do the varying shades of our suffering separate / or unite us?”—in which there are no easy answers. The losses accumulate for all of us, through bad luck or the smallest misstep, or through no fault at all, and yet in these poems, Nichols-Frazer has given us the gift of how to get back up. How to keep going.”

Kellam Ayres, author of In the Cathedral of My Undoing, finalist for Vermont Book Award

“’How long is it acceptable to mourn? How can I move on?’ These are tough questions to ask after a miscarriage. One answer, in Nichols-Frazer’s deft poems, is the lyric, which helps dig into this grief, and swells time like the moon’s waxing and waning processes. Unspooling over marked dates in the month of April, the sequence in Can you see her, the moon? offers a lyric record and insight into one speaker’s unimaginable loss. If poetry can provide solace, Nichols-Frazer’s poems show a way through.”

Sarah Audsley, author of Landlock X

“The poems Nichols-Frazer offers in Can you see her, the moon? explore the many facets of grief and loss a woman faces with the risk and ultimate realization of a miscarriage. At first, hope is tenderly evident, as in “From the clouds, a shaft of sunlight,/ The weight of a gentle dog’s head in/ a soft lap, closed eyes, heartbeat./ The quiet in a storm.”

And then the poems reveal the agonizing loss, “Now, when I fill out forms at the doctor’s office, under ‘number of pregnancies,’ I’ll have to write ‘two’ and under ‘number of children,’ ‘zero.’”  And “When they told me there was no more heartbeat/ — Gone silent—/ I felt it was inevitable, that this was what I had/ feared was coming.” Nichols-Frazer then deftly conveys the impossibility of consolation, as in “A peace lily, pink potted flowers, a bouquet of pink roses and lilies. Growth everywhere, as I wait for the blood to pass. The doctor says it like that, to pass, as if it’s a simple, non-violent thing.”  Nichols-Frazer gracefully portrays the heart wrenching and deeply personal struggle of a woman’s loss in this eloquent collection of poems.”

Elaine Pentaleri, author of Dreamscape with Absinthe (Finishing Line Press)