The Ritual of Care: Maureen Owen talks with Jiwon Choi about the challenges of caring for her mother and her book, let the heart hold down the breakage.

Reviews

If there were a Mt. Rushmore of wild and free New York School Feminist Publishing, Maureen Owen would be up there beaming ear to ear for all the tourists….Owen’s newest collection let the heart hold down the breakage Or the caregiver’s log is her twelfth book, another work of attentive recordkeeping that adheres itself to even the smallest moment’s melody or dysfunction or general allure.
—Cassandra Gillig for The Poetry Project Newsletter, #271, Winter 2023

Praise

“This magnificent work dwells in the struggle between death and dying. The poet is the one who balances this weird difficulty. She is the caregiver keeping both alive. Through nights where days of dying begin with tissues, toothpicks, cries, pillows, sheets; the caregiver’s offerings to the patient never quite work. The panic of hitting nightfall with its galloping horses, rodeos and racetracks, and the Southwest ranges try to stay as truthful to the mother as they are to the daughter transcribing them, until these darkest of lyrics lie in the realm of the divine.”
—Fanny Howe