Assisted Living by Carol L. Gloor

Moments and memories of a mother and father intersect and collide, break and melt, in Carol L. Gloor‘s intimate and universal poetic photo album. A testament to the bonds of family, this book is required reading for anyone with parents at or nearing the end of their lives, “fluttering toward death,” Required reading for all.
–Gregg Shapiro, author of Protection and GREGG SHAPIRO: 77.

In Carol L. Gloor‘s chapbook, the words we use every day (starting with the title) take on a deeper, harder meaning as she confronts those moments when all our “past acts become irrevocable.” These poems weave together memories from childhood and from those difficult days when we become our parents’ parents, supporting their stumbling steps toward death. She does not shy away from any of it: the poems are painfully accurate, whether she is remembering the “beans thick with hot dogs and ketchup” that her young mother served her as a child or “all the places where human skin folds on itself, stinks” in the last years of life. Like the man who restores her old photograph but can only save the faces, Gloor’s poems save what they can and accept that what is saved can be enough.
–Susanna Lange, author of Even Now and Two by Two

Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]