The Slow Subtraction

“I’ve never read anything remotely like The Slow Subtraction: A.L.S., Joseph Powell’s deeply loving collection that tracks how it is to lose the beloved one day at a time. These profoundly beautiful poems broach the place that

Emily Dickinson called ‘internal difference, / Where the meanings, are.’ Honesty is a difficult art; you will feel its powers grieve and restore you, over and over.”

~ Nancy Eimers, author of Oz

“The Slow Subtraction is a stunning, heartbreaking collection made more poignant for Powell’s trenchant eye on the devastations caused by A.L.S on his late wife, the poet Judith Kleck. This chronology of subtractions to ‘the

staircase / of her brain,’ and the ravages of a body’s gradual dying, create a luminous elegy. The ‘opulence in the skin’s sweet torment’ might feel like ‘all the back doors opened into coffins of alley light,’ but there is grace

here, enlarging ‘the sway of events, /the way pettiness is candleflicker against the passing night.’”

~ Adrianne Kalfopoulou, author of The History of Too Much