Her Addiction, An Empty Place at the Table by Mary Sexson

 

This is a poetry collection that will break your heart, but also make you grateful you read it. Mary Sexson tells the story of her daughter’s addiction(s) honestly, sometimes painfully, with grace and love. The first time I read the powerful and moving manuscript I sensed it could be a challenge for her to find a publisher. As the author of a book of poems about surviving abuse by a priest, however, I also had faith that some wise publisher would admire a poet who confronts difficult topics and stories like the one that Mary Sexson has the courage to tell about herself, her family, and their struggles. Sometimes she is patient, sometimes frustrated, impatient, exhausted, angry, but always she is honest. Remarkably, her love of, and loyalty to, her undependable daughter is everywhere evident.

 

The most moving part of the story is her and her husband’s having to raise their grandson, a toddler, while his mother, in her thirties, is in and out of treatment, somewhere in an alley looking for a fix, causing a traffic accident, or temporarily back home before relapsing again. Sexson makes it clear that for everyone in the family there is “a heavy toll to pay.” At first, the grandson is unaware of what’s going on, but eventually his grandmother observes him playing “The Dinosaur Game,” with “a family /of triceratops,” then realizes, “I buy him the dinosaurs / he configures / into the family he does not have.” Later the little boy asks his grandmother a series of questions, including: “Why is [my] mommy not here?” On his bedside table, a “Big Ironman” stands, whose job is “to keep him safe / until her return.”

 

It’s no surprise that the grandparents find it difficult to share this painful story with others, which makes the telling of so much truth in these eloquent poems noteworthy. “The price we all pay / for this level of intimacy is staggering,” Sexson admits. “I ache for monotony…the comfort of it.” In “Map of My Fears,” she says: “Your addiction draws lines / on my face, deep and distinct.” She becomes “tired of writing about [her] in my head.” Finally, the grandparents start to “whisper” the story of their daughter’s addiction, telling others the “facts / bare and ugly as they were.”

 

In the last poem, “The Words,” Sexson reveals all that she would like to be able to tell her daughter on her 37^th birthday. The last message is this: “Tell her / that you learn the truth about love / every time you are with her.” The poet is too wise to tell us, directly, what that truth is – the poems in this outstanding collection deserving of a wide audience have already made us see and feel it. Mary Sexson’s exquisite artistry makes forgetting her family story impossible.

 –Norbert Krapf, Former Indiana Poet Laureate

 

I’ve always appreciated the variety Mary Sexson brings to her writing. In the past she’s given us humor, other times practical advice, and often wise words. But more than anything she gives us herself. Mary is never afraid of letting us see the most sensitive moments of her life and now is no exception. She welcomes us into her private world where we can see “The indigo sky, color of my heart / today, blue tattooed across it. In this new book Her Addiction, An Empty Place at the Table, Mary has taken us into the nightmare of her daughter’s drug addiction. With these riveting poems we feel the weaving together of love and pain as she navigates the all too often calamities families suffer as the result of addiction. At the same time we feel her palpable longing for the coming of relentlessly gained joy in her daughter’s recovery.

–Joyce Brinkman, Indiana Poet Laureate 2002-2008

 

These poems are prayers written on the precipice between breaking again or growing even more resilient. They ache with the full weight of grief and the patience of healing. They remind us that we are all affected in some way by addiction. In every single poem, we learn the truth about love.

—Liza Hyatt, LMHC, ATR-BC, art therapist and poet (Under My Skin; Stories Made of World; The Mother Poems; Once, There Was a Canal; Wayfar