Carrying Clare

Carrying Clare by Joan Barasovska exemplifies the power that comes from a collection where a subject can be explored in multiple pieces. In it, the author takes us into hospitals and bedrooms and kitchens as she examines hard truths about parenting and family, including the fear and despair and difficulties that are sometimes involved. Barasovka is unflinching, and therefore trustworthy. These are not poems of easy sentiment, but ones of attention and honesty and love.

Joseph Mills, author of Bodies in Motion

In the delivery room a dreadful hush descends and Joan Barasovska, gazing upon her firstborn, prays to be the mother she will need. Joan’s poems chronicle Clare’s heart-wrenching early years:  uncertainty, pain, hard-won victories. But this collection is less about the daughter than the mother as she discovers power in weakness. In the end the family, and the reader, is refined and redeemed, as Joan puts it, in the crucible of fear and love.

Bill Griffin, author of How We All Fly

In a voice that never shifts to self-pity, never claims heroism, Barasovska describes her daughter Clare’s childhood of debilitating illness and frequent surgeries, and a family buffeted by “cycles of crisis and recovery, terror and tentative relief.” She longs to offer her daughter “ordinary everything, the intact body of a healthy child,” and understands that Clare derives strength partly by “muscling hard against me.” These beautiful and harrowing poems will move you, and stay with you.

Janis Harrington, author of How to Cut a Woman in Half