Some of Our Parts by Gloria Heffernan

Gloria Heffernan’s poems welcome us in to the joys and sorrows of life centering on the roles of daughter, sister, friend. She allows us to experience these relationships in an intimate and honest way. Her evocative images offer us a journey finished with the sights and sounds of days gone by but remembered with tenderness. These poems offer the reader an opportunity to slip into them and experience with heartfelt joy…… and possibly a tear in the eye.

–Nancy Slonim-Aronie, NPR commentator and author of Writing from the Heart.

What if evolving means a turning away from power—toward empathy and unacknowledged selflessness? In these tender poems, Heffernan pays quiet tribute to women. Speaking on the loss of her sister, Heffernan writes that “the mirror I looked to all my life / is gone” and reveals an apprehension beyond grief—an understanding of what the women in our lives offer us.

–Jessica Cuello, author of Hunt and Pricking

Gloria Heffernan reaches into the depth of memory’s purse and locates the women who have helped shape her. With a keen eye for image and a strong, sure voice, her poems reveal and examine issues of class and suffering and love and loss, what she calls “this business of living.”  And yes, these poems pulse with the heart that underlies their wisdom. They are poems that know through experience that mourning and morning are sisters, that “Grief is the outer fabric of a coat / lined with gratitude.”

–Linda Tomol Pennisi, Author of Seamless (Perugia Press): Suddenly, Fruit (Carolina Wren Press); Minuscule Boxes in the Bird’s Bright Throat (Toadlily Press).