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| The Hands of Strangers : Poems from the Nursing Home
ISBN: 9781934414675
Platform/Publisher: Ebook Central / BOA Editions Ltd.
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Limited; Download: 7 Days at a Time
Subjects: Literature;
Most of us do not think much of the frail elderly, the people who require constant care to get to the end of the day, near the end of their lives; still less do most of us think about their caregivers, the paraprofessionals and aides who perform, in nursing homes and outside them, an endless string of repetitive duties. Harrington's arresting book-length sequence of short clear poems takes long looks at these scenes, and at the people in them. Some are sweet ("an old married couple, admitted together") and some are monuments to goodness, in patients and in their attendants: "Never carefully enough, never slowly/ enough are old women lifted and lowered/ into their rolling chairs." At least as often, though, we see the difficulties, and indeed the disgust: there is a rape (in a poem called "Gently"), and another poem about "Pressure Wounds,"-"pus pit, grave pinch,/ mattress canker." Harrington (Even the Hollow My Body Made Is Gone) stands out with an elegy for the otherwise completely forgotten May Engles, who died in 1977; everything else she depicts, though, could take place today. Both attendants and patients emerge as human, as people with tough tasks and inner lives, in these pellucid, scary, morally resonant poems. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Janice N. Harrington: Janice N. Harrington writes poetry and children's books. She grew up in Alabama and Nebraska, and both those settings figure largely in her writing. Her first book of poetry, Even the Hollow My Body Made Is Gone (2007), won the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize from BOA Editions and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She is also the winner of a 2007 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship for Poetry and a 2009 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award for emerging women writers. The author as well of award-winning children's books, Harrington now teaches creative writing at the University of Illinois.
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