This debut collection of poems explores themes of love, grief and one family coming to terms with a wife and mother’s cancer. From love at first sight to his wife’s passing, follow the author and his family as they continue to live life, despite the uncertainties of this progressive disease. Through the brevity of Cinquans, the imagery of a Haibun and the beauty of a Nonet, the author says much with these minimalist formats. This book will resonate with readers who have felt the heartache and pain of caring for a loved one. #griefpoetry #griefandloss #griefandlosssupport #cancer #cancerjourney #poets #poetry
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Monty Mittleman retired from the Illinois Department of Corrections and is a licensed EMT. He has an MPA from San Diego State University and a BS in Criminal Justice from Illinois State University. This collection is part love letter and a story about one family and cancer.
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“In Recalibrations, Monty Mittleman gives us a gem in every poem in this treasure chest of shared memory. Handfasted by water, apple-pie fingers, charcoal shadows, coyote soprano, pick-your-pocket breezes— these gorgeous phrases are woven through this homage to a beautiful marriage cut short by illness. Mittleman is a poet of the senses, a citizen of Alive. Look up! An eleven o’clock sun deepening emerald shadows. Eyes on us: black bear. This is a journeying love song where memories have become the cartographers, sketching their own maps. Follow his heartbeat through this striking topography of love and loss.”
–Katrin Talbot, author of The Devil Orders a Latte and others
“Whether it’s fixing the porch light in Decatur or climbing a twisted staircase in southern Italy, Monty Mittleman’s inaugural collection Recalibrations, details a lifelong journey with his beloved: rare earth metals, magnetized, with rust belt smiles, fulfilling dreams, growing old on porch swings, desiring to be albatross, until the dreaded hourglass runs out, with a promise to meet again, at heaven’s gate. Mittleman’s chapbook brimming with distinct cinquain, haibun, & visual poems, offers its hand, asks you to join along on the climbs, paddles, road trips, windy days, stinging sweats, and brown edges. Hear the rhythmic sound of Texas pump jacks, the shrill cry of the trench whistle, as you go into battle, and the brass sounds of jazz through heated Nola night air. This collection of deftly crafted poems can easily be enjoyed in one sitting but will leave you wanting to read it over and over again.”
–-Camille Norvaisas, author of Rare as the Kotuku
“In the compressed perfection of their form and the purity of their language these poems achieve a kind of pearlescence. Facets implicate a roundness, as Emerson suggested we find in the arc of any given truth the circle of its beauty. Recalibrations pulses with love, grief, wonder, loss, and, always, a gentle resilience deriving from the resilience of the natural world. There is an elegiac energy throughout, a feeling that love and loss are of a piece, that beauty—his partner’s, his children’s, that of a pumpkin patch or of sunlight warming the backs of stallions—is present to us but in passing. For tightness of expression and large-heartedness, for playful canniness and wisdom, I doubt there’s a more accomplished poet at work today than Mittleman.”
–Terence Culleton, author of A Tree and Gone
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