Description
ME AND HER SHADOW
by Christine R. Lund
$14.99, paper
978-1-64662-327-3
2020
ME AND HER SHADOW tells the story of the author’s journey of healing after the death of her daughter. The poems also celebrate her lost daughter’s life, through memories and some of her possessions. The author connects to her child through them, and through being out in nature. She sees her daughter first in butterflies, then in crows. While sensing her daughter’s presence in her heart, she comes to believe that spirit survives death. Yet there remains a poignancy to this loss. As she says at the end of her poem, Becoming A Healer, “…and while it feels like betrayal, healing has occurred.” Sometimes sad, sometimes uplifting, these poems are lyrical and honest, shared in the hopes of helping others who are experiencing loss—and everyone who feels love.
Christine R. Lund is a poet and writer living in Santa Fe, New Mexico. ME AND HER SHADOW is her first chapbook of poems to be published. Each of these poems lights in some way on her daughter, Kaja, who died at age 23. This tribute and elegy is the story of a mother and daughter, shaped as a musical drama, with poems in place of songs. A self-portrait of Kaja appears on the cover. Christine’s poetry has been published in The Denver Post, The Hungry Poet’s Cookbook and The New Poets’ Anthology, among other publications. Her travel articles and book reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Albuquerque Journal and Endless Vacation magazine.
Nat Mauldin (verified owner) –
“She will be there, helping me select, what best conveys the ineffable—the grace in the heart of this mother who finds I have been rearranged, by what is unspeakable.” The unspeakable here refers to the most dreaded fear of any parent and, for the author of this remarkable collection of poems, it has come to pass. Drawing from memories of her daughter Kaja’s childhood and adolescence as well as more recent observations that serve (and will always serve) as reminders, Lund doesn’t simply express her grief, she delves into it as if it were a network of unexplored caves. The result is a moving tribute that reveals her determination to fathom all the reasons why and to keep Kaja’s spirit close while, at the same time, getting on with her life. Ultimately, surprisingly, these works left me with an abiding sense of hope. After spending the morning singing my pandemic prisoner blues to anyone who would listen I opened this book and spent time with a mother who has endured unbearable pain, but instead of pleading for my sympathy she held out a hand and lifted me up… per her request I went “dancing along, to these songs” about the two of them and wore a smile for the rest of the day. Me and Her Shadow is a great read for everyone, and a must-read for anyone who is struggling to process the profound heartbreak of losing a child.
Elise Rosenhaupt, author of the memoir Climbing Back: A Family’s Journey through Brain Injury (verified owner) –
In Me and Her Shadow, Christine Lund, who has endured every parent’s greatest fear, her child’s death, has written tender poems that bring the reader along with her – through pain (“I’ve been feeling my way ever since/through the fall out, shaken”), healing connections (“I can regain the lost magic, that rubs off/from my connection to her, through her objects,/like her pencils that I use here, every morning”), and resilience (“love is all there is./It’s what we have, or can have/that is real”).
In the last poems, Lund comes to acceptance (“We do what we can, with what happens in life”). And her final poem, “Roll the Credits,” has a welcome lightness:
“I saw the name of Kaja
scrolling down my TV screen,
one of the people who works there,
every day behind the scenes.
Just a nanosecond
as I kept watching the screen,
after the program ended—
and it leaped out at me.
Did I even see it?
Honey, thanks for visiting.”
Me and Her Shadow is written by a survivor whose resilience comes through in her work, loud and clear. Read Christine Lund’s book, and ponder how we all manage to survive.