Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno

This collection of 41 poems forms a full narrative arc about Bonanno’s loss of her adult daughter to murder. It’s extraordinarily accessible (could almost be prose vignettes) and emotionally brutal (maybe too brutal for mothers in grief, but recommended for every friend/relative of one).

TEA TIME

Losing your daughter,
losing your daughter to murder,
requires adjustment.

Like, say,
you are sipping tea
and someone
reaches over and
fantastically yanks
your heart from your chest

and it drops, pumping,
onto the table
and there it is,
there is the matter,
your whole heart,
that brilliant engine,

that tuber,
vulgar, purple,
red

and you simply don’t die,
you see;
you blanch,
and your brain beats on
and then, and then,

invariably,
you reach down
to straighten a spoon.… (mere)

After reading the first few poems in this book, I knew I would have to read them all before I would be able to set it down again. This is an amazingly, heartbreakingly honest glimpse into the pain of a mother grieving for her murdered daughter.

I didn’t really know what to expect when I picked up this book. The titles and the few lines that I read as I flipped through it caught my attention and drew me into an unforgettable experience. The author truly grabbed my heart as I lost myself in the raw emotion of her prose. Slamming Open the Door did just as the title suggests.

I was totally swept away by this book. I highly recommend it, even if you are not that interested in poetry. This was more that simply a book of poems. Slamming Open the Door is about pain, heartbreak, and loss, in short, this is a small volume of humanity.… (mere)