Family as celestial body by Patty Ware

In this stunning debut book, poet Patty Ware asks: “have you ever met vulnerable?” and then carries us out onto this a branch of memoir poems.  She unfurls poems of childhood trauma, stories of a parent with dementia, and the complexity of having six siblings.  Growing out of this, she begins to weave a more complex personal spirituality and sense of self.  Her childhood was “a trail of twigs and discard—was somewhere here a nest?”  Certainly these poems, woven together, create a deeply honest poem nest, inviting us in to explore vulnerability, safety, and the question of how each of us lives on our own thin branches.

–Emily Wall, Professor of English at the University of Alaska Southeast, and author of Flame, Fist, and Fig.  

Ware’s debut collection probes the function and character of a blended family created by a spirited Filipina mother—“Kitchen warrior, goddess of Sinigang…Youth Dew dauber / scholar of suffering”—and rough GI father. Like a skilled astronomer, the adult speaker of these poems guides us through a moment in which “death has extinguished our Great Bear,” the father without whom the “core” collapses, scattering seven siblings, while the mother’s dementia has turned her words into “ravens,” her voice into a “raucous…sharp black night.” Against the “black hole” of such losses Ware’s poems are scattered star dust, illuminated histories of two mismatched parents giving their imperfect best to each other, themselves, and their children. Anyone who has experienced family as miraculous and wounding, intimate yet ultimately unknowable, will resonate with Ware’s fierce, tender constellation of Family as Celestial Body.

–Erin Redfern, Spellbreaking and Other Life Skills

In this tender elegiac collection, Patty Ware explores the “postmortem” of a complex, blended family with a desire to “pinpoint / when our house began its decline.” Skillfully employing flexible form and engaging syntax, Ware reckons with the echo of parents’ choices in the lives of their children.  The speaker in these poems interrogates her siblings, her dead father, and her Filipino immigrant mother: “What will become of / us, bodies wandering // tunnels riddled by family past…” Grappling with undercurrents of Catholicism as her mother declines with dementia, the speaker yearns for grace and release. Family as Celestial Body is the wise debut of a poet who wants to “confirm we are fixable,” and who helps us consider acceptance––even in the face of an unchangeable past.

–Melissa McKinstry, poet and inaugural writer-in-residence at The Millay House Rockland, MelissaMcKinstry.com