My first poetry collection: Aftermath
Now available at Amazon and at Finishing Line Press
Poetry of grief and confusion
When my 19 year old nephew died of a drug overdose, we could hardly comprehend what was happening. In the dizzying next 18 months, two dear friends also died--albeit under dramatically different circumstances. I lost interest in the mystery novel and the woman in business memoir I'd been working on, and I found myself writing through grief and confusion. How do I make sense of my life in the face of death's inevitability? How do any of us?
Response from early readers
Katherine Flannery Dering’s beautiful collection Aftermath is a meditation on our search for connection, even as the losses pile up. What do we do when death surprises us? How do we reach across time and space to those who are gone? Through writing, perhaps, or maybe we hope to join them eventually in “a place among those/stars, floating through the light as it streams through the universe.” A lovely hope indeed.
—Laurel S. Peterson, Poet Laureate, Norwalk CT,
author of Do You Expect Your Art to Answer?
Katherine Flannery Dering’s poems give their full lyric attention to the natural world and shine a keen eye on the daily vividness of life. Birds at the feeder, boys on skateboards, an old cat, a stained bathrobe, a walk through a labyrinth, a boat ride on the lake—they all bring their meditations on the nature of existence, humming the low notes of grief and loss even as they illuminate the beauty and truth of the ordinary hours.
—Carla Funk, author of Gloryland,
Apologetic, and The Sewing Room
From remnants of loss, shreds of doubt and slivers of hope, Katherine Flannery Dering has fashioned a texturally complex and cumulatively moving poetic collage. The images and language in Aftermath are vivid and sure—a grieving sister becomes “an Inuit carving, / smooth and compact, / her back a soft curve”—even as these poems necessarily produce more questions about life (“How is this supposed to work?”) than answers. Here we experience a slice of lived history that, for all its difficulty, still, miraculously, vivifies.
—Scott Mason, author of The Wonder Code, recipient of the Touchstone Distinguished Book Award from The Haiku Foundation