Cauterized

For more than twenty years, Laura Apol has conducted workshops for writers of all skill levels in local, national, and international contexts. She is the author of several collections of poetry, including Nothing but the Blood, winner of the 2019 Oklahoma Book Award for poetry and the 2019 silver medal for the Independent Publisher Book Award for poetry, and A Fine Yellow Dust, winner of the 2022 Midwest Book Award for Poetry. From 2019-2021, Apol served as the poet laureate for the Lansing area in mid-Michigan.

• Contents i Vanishing Point Stigmata Opening the Field Blood Navigation Is Touch Spectral Sowing with Salt ii Ode to the Heron desire Missed After Her Daughter Died Why, Then, Do I Feel Such Loss? Never the River Seated Photo of My Mother at Eighteen The First Night We Leave My Mother at Crowne Pointe Hershey’s, 1972 Bridges But Winter December Crossing iii Graft Mani-Pedi And I Can’t Delete Her Voicemail Messages, Even after All These Years Why I Hate Living Alone Un Sospiro Quarantine Fatigue Sentience Locks Twins Third Avenue Honor iv Inferno Hurricane Hanna a friend asks if i believe in heaven Regret At the Edge of Sixty, Autumn January, Pandemic Offering It Was the Wind Memory and Breath Afterlife v I Take a Realtor through the House I’ve Lived in for Twenty-Five Years Why of the Black Moon Mothering In Time Elegy Gift Prayer in the Time of COVID still, life vi Cradlesong If Birds, April One Magnolia Riven Memoir Rapture Rwanda, Twenty Years On Umbra Backbeat vii Cauterized Notes Acknowledgments

As I read the poems in Laura Apol’s newest collection, Cauterized, I feel them existing inside me. This is what I cherish as a reader—to have a poet who skillfully leads me on a journey with her stunning imagery of monarchs, cats, dogs, and the encompassing natural world. Apol weaves beautiful narratives of family, grief, relationships, and the rawness of life always with empathy, always while embracing the lifeblood of existence. . . . The brilliance of this work changed me in the best ways, both as a poet and person. —Kelli Russell Agodon, author of Dialogues with Rising TidesThe spirits that hover over and through these poems become entirely incarnate at the poet’s beckoning. The shades, of course, come freighted with questions. There are good ghosts, umbrae of their former or imagined lives with which the poet seems eager to reconnect. Accordingly, the work traffics in the essential rather than accessory dynamics of love and grief, faith and its failings—a brave endeavor, to bring such things to light. —Thomas Lynch, author of Bone Rosary: New and Selected PoemsLaura Apol’s Cauterized is a lovely collection of poetry. Rich imagery sets the stage through which the emotional reveal packs its punch. Poems of grief and loss, of the victories and failures within relationships both familial and romantic, of the vicissitudes of being alive in this wondrously tangled existence remind us all to pay close attention, to learn the songs of nature, and to fully inhabit the possible. Brava. —Pia Täavila-Borsheim, author of Above the Birch Line