Laura Foley
Coming Soon!
Sister in a Different Movie
by Laura Foley
ISBN: 978-1-962405-75-1
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Laura Foley is the author of eleven previous poetry collections including, most recently, Sledding the Valley of the Shadow, and Ice Cream for Lunch. She has won a Narrative Magazine Poetry Prize, Common Good Books Poetry Prize, Poetry Box Editor’s Choice Chapbook Award, Bisexual Book Award, and others. Her work has been widely published in such journals as Alaska Quarterly, Valparaiso Poetry Review, American Life in Poetry, One Art, and anthologies such as How to Love the World and Poetry of Presence. She holds graduate degrees in Literature from Columbia University, and lives with her wife and their two romping canines on the steep banks of the Connecticut River in New Hampshire.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In Sister in a Different Movie, four sisters navigate a shared legacy of war trauma, mental illness, and enduring sisterhood. These imagistic, musically rich poems embrace negative capability––welcoming the mind’s shadows and light with compassion. As the youngest sister seeks to understand the complexities of their father’s past and the impact on their family, the poems explore how even estrangement cannot sever the deep bonds between siblings. Together, they endure the emotional undertow of their father’s legacy and the limitations of a mother who could only save one from drowning.
ADVANCE PRAISE:
“My shard is the piece of brokenness I use to cast light,” poet Laura Foley writes in Sister in a Different Movie, “back into the past to find what shines from my darkest places.” Foley has a candid, compassionate voice that builds emotion into her poems in nuanced layers of narrative, bright imagery, and subtle music, an accomplishment not easily achieved. Her new collection––perhaps her most powerful––intersperses poems about a sister with mental illness who “escaped the locked door of her life,” and the rage of a father, a noted doctor (who spent four years as a prisoner of war) with joyful, loving, and sensuous poems about her wife, children and grandkids. In one poem, her granddaughter “plasters angel stickers / across the polished floor”; in another the speaker makes her “hungry way home with her beloved.” The poet sees beauty in what often goes unnoticed in nature, and even a migraine headache can lead to insight. Sister in a Different Movie is a bittersweet book filled with revelations that lead us on a sane path through the world in which we live and love.
––Jeff Friedman, author of Ashes in Paradise and Broken Signals
These exquisite poems by Laura Foley offer us a poignant celebration of life, bowing to both the living and the long gone in her family. In these finely crafted pieces, we encounter poems for a father held as a prisoner of war and the wounds he carried home, for the dark memories of a mentally ill sister, and for the deceased husband whose being went on singing through her. Foley holds the sorrows of loss with uncommon clarity, raising the brokenness of grief into a reverence for precious life. Yet these poems also inhabit the present––naming the ravages of war even as they abide with the gifts that grace each day: the joy and gratitude inspired by a giggling granddaughter, the warming solace of her dog, a single falling leaf catching light, and the tender journey she shares with her beloved wife. Laura Foley is a master poet of both darkness and light, and this new collection is a testament to her luminous vision.
––Judith Sarah Schmidt, PhD, Waking Dream Therapist,
author of In the Garden of Love and Loss
