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Our Aching Bones, Our Breaking Hearts: Poems on Aging
by Joel Savishinsky
18 Poems ~ 50 pages
Price: $14.00
Publisher: The Poetry Box
ISBN: 978-1-956285-33-8
To Order: Amazon.com
ABOUT THE BOOK:
We confront our own aging long before we ourselves become old. Through the roles we play as family, friends, or caregivers to our elders, we learn to anticipate our own later ears. Drawing on the author’s half-century career in gerontology and anthropology, the poems of Our Aching Bones, Our Breaking Hearts explore the physical, emotional, and spiritual impact of the aging experience. At the core of these stories stand the aging body and mind, the well-worn heart, deep reservoirs of humor, love, and anger, and the longing, defiance, regret and gratitude of life’s concluding decades.
ADVANCE PRAISE:
“This collection finds the pathos, the epiphanies, and light for a darkening path because though aging and death are old news, this contradiction, this broken contract, is happening to us for the first time and we need a little help from our friends.”
–Sandra L. Kleven, editor of Cirque
“Savishinsky’s stories and visceral imagery show us how we deepen by enduring. You long remember the kindness and depth of this highly skilled poet.”
–Ellen Hirning Schmidt, author of Oh, Say Did You Know
“Whether speaking as the main character or an observer, these poems ring true and prescient.”
–D Ferrara, founder of San Fedele Press
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
When Joel Savishinsky published the first poem from this collection at age 40, he was a young anthropologist and gerontologist who never thought he’d grow old. Four decades later, now a grandfather and family elder, he smiles at his earlier lack of imagination. He is the author of The Ends of Time: Life and Work in a Nursing Home and Breaking the Watch: The Meanings of Retirement in America, both of which won the Gerontological Society of America’s Richard Kalish Award. Since retiring, he has been transforming his experiences with the aging into poetry, short fiction and essays. A Pushcart Prize nominee, his work has appeared in American Writers Review, Blood and Thunder, Cirque, The Examined Life Journal, The New York Times, The Poeming Pigeon, Soul-Lit, and Windfall.
FROM THE BOOK:
Barcode
by Joel Shavishinsky
You don’t measure a life
by its length. You don’t
measured lives.
You live them.
If forced to choose,
choose love. Even better,
choose not to choose.
Working in the market, recently retired,
a nurse told her doctor how she now
stacked cans, moved the old milk
to the front of the shelves,
struggled with the scanner.
Unlike the old days, she said,
everything on sale is dated …
just like me: a looseness
in the valves, a tightening
in the joints.
She described how she
could feel the loss of fluids:
dry-eyed, tongue-tied,
other outlets leaking.
She said she was:
Perspiration.
Respiration.
Expiration.
Date unclear.
Where is my label?
she had asked herself.
My chip? What
is my barcode?
They must lie deep in
the amino acids’ four names,
my parents’ love letters.
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