In the Months of My Son's Recovery: Poems - Paperback

by Kate Daniels (Author), Dave Smith (Editor)

The poems of In the Months of My Son's Recovery inhabit the voice and point of view of the mother of a heroin addict who enters recovery. With clear perception and precise emotional tones, Kate Daniels explores recovery experiences from multiple, evolving vantage points, including active addiction, 12-step treatment, co-occurring mental illness and addiction (known as dual diagnosis), and relapse. These intimately voiced, harrowing poems reveal the collateral damage that addiction inflicts on friends and families, in addition to the primary damage sustained by addicts themselves. Offering bold descriptions of medical processes, maternal love, and the potential for hope as an antidote to despair, this timely collection offers a firsthand account of the many crises at the heart of the opioid epidemic.

Front Jacket

In this riveting new collection of poems, In the Months of My Son's Recovery, Kate Daniels captures the stuff we humans are made of--dark and light--the nitty-gritty truths of flesh and blood, sweat and tears, but also this poignant collection maps and magnifies the brilliance of Daniels's earthy imagination. The opening poem, "Her Barbaric Yawp," invokes Walt Whitman as a guide into a passionate persona's daring narratives divining the addict's psychological and physical world. This ledger of contrasting images stitched with naked feeling creates a baroque summoning aimed at the collective heart, especially in these times of opioids spreading this deep grief across America. In the Months of My Son's Recovery is a personal reckoning that shows us the painful shape of truth beneath real skin. Not only does this collection move musically, but also its directness cues the speaker's hard-earned rites. Daniels unspools tropes of true blues. The final poem, "Yes," ends with three lines that create the feeling of a haiku: "The sun is on our shoulders/In the graveyard, and it is hard/Not to exult in that warmth." Indeed, yes, Kate Daniels has woven out of love and sentiment an unselfish, haunting, gutsy anthem for our times. -- Yusef Komunyakaa

As for, In the Months of My Son's Recovery, once again Kate Daniels delivers a brave, bold and beautiful new book of poems, giving voice-- as only she can-- to the aging female body, to the scars -both physical and psychical--incurred by the batterings of love and lust, loving, mothering, mourning, and more, more--there's a plenitude of vision in her poems. And the words to absorb it. I always discover the language I've needed for moments I never before understood or could express. Her poems give me the thrilling experience of epiphany as if (to quote her own words) some great blow has struck me everywhere once. Addiction, lust and lack thereof in the aging body, illness, loss, history, its legacy and its betrayals--what doesn't Kate Daniels dare to address? And throughout the transcendent sense that the final word is "Yes" because there are achingly beautiful poems like hers to carry us through.--Julia Alvarez is the author of several collections of poetry, including Homecoming, The Other Side/El otro lado, and The Woman I Kept to Myself, as well as the novels How the García Girls Lost Their Accents and In the Time of the Butterflies

Author Biography

Kate Daniels is the Edwin Mims Professor of English at Vanderbilt University, a former Guggenheim fellow in poetry, and a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. She also teaches writing at the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis. Her previous collections of poetry include A Walk in Victoria's Secret and Four Testimonies.