Haylee Schwenk is a poet and editor from Pennsylvania resettled in northeastern Ohio. Her work has appeared in Shelia-na-gig online, Great Lakes Review, CrayfishMag, the anthology Light Enters the Grove from Kent State University Press, and elsewhere. This is her first chapbook. You can find her on Instagram @hayleeschwenk.
These poems float in the gravity-free liminal fluid at the end of life and beginning of death. Quiet grief measures the loss of summer walks in the neighborhood, the absence of a joke, the one who never comes back through the door. This collection’s canvas is memory expansive, from the kitchen to the pleasure of French in the mouth to the stars four light years away and an imagined future. The poems open their pockets to catch the tender details and a new sense of home.
–Karen Schubert, Executive Director of Lit Youngstown and author of The Compost Reader (Accents Publishing).
The spare elegiac lyrics of Haylee Schwenk’s In Case of Loss often return to the interplay of light and dark, love and loss where she “cannot tell the birds//from their shadows.” She plumbs the deeper resonances of conceptual words like grief, home, never and, in the title poem, an erasure piece, loss. These exquisitely crafted poems, akin to Dickinson’s, find balm in the redemptive power of memory and nature, “how one leaf hangs on, ablaze.” This is a heartbreakingly poignant remembrance of her beloved’s passing and a celebration of the life they shared.
–Ray McNiece, Cleveland Arts’ Prize Life-Time Achievement Award Winner.
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