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The Semantics of Grief by Mary Sexson

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This title will be released on January 22, 2027

 

The Semantics of Grief is a collection of poems that follow the grief of my husband’s illness and the grief of his death. The poems were written over a period of time, so both before and after he died.  These poems are about how we take care of each other, how we weather the illness of someone we love, how we cope with the losses that accumulate over that period of time, from diagnosis to death, so to speak.  The poems are also, inevitably, about love, how it looks and feels when you’re losing the person that you love. How we cope with stress and fear during this time.  How sickness and death and grief affect the family that moves through it, and how those feelings evolve over time. #death, #loss, #fear, #acceptance, #grief

 

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Mary Sexson is an award-winning poet with two full-length books and 2 collaborative chapbooks.  Her most recent full-length book is Her Addiction An Empty Place at the Table, (Finishing Line Press June 2023).  Chatter House Press released both of her collaborative chapbooks, Company of Women (2013) and Marriage Maps and Driven Destinies (2023). Her work has appeared in Alien Buddha, Tipton Poetry Journal, The Indianapolis Review, Of Rust and Glass, Last Stanza Poetry Journal, and Anti-Heroin Chic, among many others.  Six of her poems are archived in the INverse collection of Hoosier Poets, at the Indiana State Library. Sexson has a Best of the Net and seven Pushcart Prize nominations.

 

PRAISE:

 

Mary Sexson’s chapbook, The Semantics of Grief, is a powerful collection of poems. They begin with the poet discovering that her beloved husband has a rare cancer to her coping with the inevitable. Sexson takes us through the stages in a manner that is befitting a love story of a couple who spent a lifetime together. She doesn’t sugarcoat this experience, the frustrations, the ups and downs, she is raw and fighting alongside her husband for his life. In “A New Translation,” she mulls, “I found myself crossing my fingers,/ hoping we could lie in bed together/for another forty-eight years,/laughing about how fast/our grandson grew up,/ not crying because there isn’t enough time.” In “Forecast” she’s “on the other side of this sorrow,” attempting to come to terms with devastating loss. Sexson’s chapbook is a must read for those who find themselves in need of shared words of lived experiences when grief befalls them.
–-Lylanne Musselman, author of Staring Dementia in the Face and It’s Not Love, Unfortunately, and the forthcoming In My Life: A Pop Culture Poetry Memoir

 

These poems reveal how the vastness of grief is interpenetrated by the simple, ordinary tokens of life – a bedpan to clean, a glass of water to fill, a memory of sunglasses and a smile.  Through Sexson’s spare poetic honesty, we are given solid ground to rest upon as we fall into the emptiness, the ocean, the galaxy, the immense opening that grief needs us to enter.   These poems sound the depths of personal grief with a wisdom that is universal. Each stanza, each phrase in these poems will help readers bear their own grieving more tenderly and courageously.
–Liza Hyatt is an art therapist and poet, author of Wayfaring (Fernwood Press) 

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