A Fine Yellow Dust

by Laura Apol

Overview

In late April 2017, Laura Apol’s twenty-six-year-old daughter, Hanna, took her own life. Apol had long believed in the therapeutic possibilities of writing, having conducted workshops on writing-for-healing for more than a decade. Yet after Hanna’s death, she had her own therapeutic writing to do, turning her anguish, disbelief, and love into poems that map the first year of loss. This collection is the result of that writing, giving voice to grief as it is lived, moment by moment, memory by memory, event by event. While most writing about loss does so from a distance, Apol chooses instead to write from inside those days and months and seasons, allowing readers to experience alongside the poet the moments, the questions, and the deep longings that shape the first grief-year.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781611864021
Publisher:	Michigan State University Press
Publication date:	08/01/2021
Pages:	106
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

LAURA APOL is the author of several collections of poetry, including Falling into Grace; Crossing the Ladder of Sun; Requiem, Rwanda; and Nothing but the Blood, winner of the 2019 Oklahoma Book Award for poetry and the 2019 Independent Publisher Award silver medal for poetry. She currently serves as the poet laureate for the Lansing area in mid-Michigan.

Table of Contents

Preface xi

The Little Mermaid 1

When It All Seems Too Much 2

Bipolar 3

Onsra 4

Homing 5

Too Late 6

On Returning from Holland, I Find a Lone Tulip in My Garden 7

Revision 8

The Funeral Director Asks 11

Lullaby 12

Instructions for the Friends Who Are Sorting My Daughter's Things This Afternoon 13

Hers 14

Patient Stone 15

The Fox 16

First Mother's Day after Her Death 17

Persephone 21

Of the Heart 22

Birth Mark 23

Betrayal 25

Dream in Which My Daughter Forgives 26

Protection 27

Seaglass 28

The Baby 31

Eclipse 32

End of the Motherline 33

Flight 34

Elephant Ears 35

Shooting 36

Sleeping Beauty 37

River of Oblivion 38

Prayer on Opening Day 41

Felo De Se 42

First Thanksgiving without Her 44

Only Bone 45

Grief 47

Pearls 48

First Christmas without Her 49

Wound 50

I Rent a Room in Victoria 51

Gestation 52

As If 53

Metamorphosis 54

Her Father 57

Grooming 58

The Breaking 59

Last Entry 64

The Cruelest Month 67

Ash Wednesday 68

Easter Morning 69

One Turn from Silence 70

Who Speaks with Angels 72

Evensong 74

Coming Home to the River 75

And on 76

A Pause in an All-Day Rain 79

Author's Note 81

Acknowledgments 87

Editorial Reviews

This collection of poems hangs together brilliantly, each poem standing alone but building on the one that went before and the one that follows. Anyone who loves poetry will love this book. Anyone who has lost a child will seek it out. Any human who has felt grief or fears the grief to come will find this book a balm and a revelation.—Lorna Crozier, author of Through the Garden: A Love Story (with Cats)

This is a poet whose craft is subtle, who writes poems of exceptional gravity and beauty. This is a courageous book, and what the poet has had to walk through, to live through, in order to write this book took a kind of bravery, a kind of nerve, few could imagine.—Todd Davis, author of Native Species

These poems are both urgent and necessary, speaking to all of us, not just to mourners. They are hard poems, without easy consolation, urging us to love the world in spite of its unspeakable sorrow. The best poetry can tear your heart into shreds, but it can also mend it again, and that’s what Laura Apol is doing here. These are poems I will return to, again and again.—Barbara Crooker, author of Some Glad Morning

A Fine Yellow Dust bears witness to what it means to survive the unbearable. This book is for us all: survivors who need to find solace when there is none, those who want to comfort the grief stricken yet don’t know how, and for those training in suicide prevention who need to understand the transformative power of writing and what it means to find a flicker of hope in the company of grief.—Katrina Jaworski, author of The Gender of Suicide: Knowledge Production, Theory and Suicidology
 

From the Publisher