What I Didn’t Give to Goodwill by Ginger Graziano

What a beautiful, heart breaking, heart healing collection this is.  Beginning with a devastating sequence that re-lives the loss of her  son to cancer, Graziano then describes her life “Before” and “After”  his death in narratives that trace her literal journey from her native  New York to her “new native land” of western North Carolina. And her emotional journey from searing grief to hard won joy and love.  These vivid and powerful poems will compel your attention and  your empathy.  

–Eric Nelson,  author of Horse Not Zebra and Some Wonder 

“Hold out the fired bowl of your heart,” Ginger Graziano urges, in  What I Didn’t Give to Goodwill. That hard-earned gesture of hope  is borne through poems of grief, legacy, and resilience in this strong,  three-part collection. Graziano relates the suffering of her son, dying  from brain cancer, the strength she secured from a proud, Italian  immigrant family, and her renewal of spirit claimed in gardening,  a move to a new state, and a necessary balance of society and  solitude. The memory of her son powers her determination: “[W]hen  moths chew holes in his jackets, / I will see light through the broken  threads.” Read these fine poems for their discerning light. 

–Kenneth Chamlee, author of The Best Material for the Artist in the World 

At a Goodwill Store, you may find a football jacket with gold leather sleeves. But you can’t find the boy who wore it. With fervent angst,  Ginger Graziano recounts the loss of her son to a brain tumor and of  the things she must keep in her heart. Her poems let us into the last  car rides and afternoons with her son, and how she still wears “his  old shirt, sleeves rolled up.”  She roams through memory into her  early life, her intractable family, and after leaving home, her finding renewal. The poems, both resonant and alluring, capture the deep  source of what makes life memorial: her profound empathy for the mysteries of this world.   

–Bruce P. Spang, Author of Twist, Warren Publisher, 2025