agriculture of grief: prayers for my father’s dementia by Mejdulene Bernard Shomali

What if mourning requires patient cultivation more than a bustle in the house and sweeping up the heart? In her elegant debut chapbook, agriculture of grief: prayers for my father’s dementia, Mejdulene Bernard Shomali sings a mourner’s music as she tills the page of her father’s double-death—first from dementia, and then from old age. As she writes, “dementia is a trial run with dying…/he could be a stranger/lost & disoriented from travel//i cannot follow him there.” Yet through these poems, Shomali brings her father home, brings him as much as anyone can be back into this life—or into another life, the life in language. “i want nothing from this earth or its false gods,” she writes, “i want nothing but my father home.” Melding Arabic with Catholic prayers and keen memories of her baba, Shomali’s deft poetry bears the fruit of such grief.

–Philip Metres, author of Fugitive/Refuge

Mejdulene Bernard Shomali‘s poems are instructional, not in the sense that they mean to educate—though they do—but in that they command attention, which they accomplish by being acutely attentive themselves: to language, to the subtleties of pain and joy, to the discoveries that arise out of loss and longing. The poems here truly act as prayers. They entreat us to listen, to feel, and to share in our most vulnerable realities. It is so easy for poems of grief to be narrow and self-absorbed. These are anything but—they are capacious, and despite the griefs that gave rise to them, they are full of life.

–Hayan Charara, author of These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit