These poems are the work of a master, with Davis contrasting the fate of millions of people with COVID-19 with the specifics of her daughter's unfolding illness, "the tragedy within the tragedy." The poet's gaze is direct, attuned to the details of suffering, and at the same time, generous, vulnerable, beautiful, and compassionate...In this stunning collection of poems, Cortney Davis becomes our guide, our mentor, holding the reader in her arms the way she held her daughter on both her first and final journeys, "all the way home."

―Richard M. Berlin, M.D., author of Freud on My Couch

With a slamming storm of personal grief, Cortney Davis allows her holy and stunningly accurate attention, her great capacity to touch human beings and their bodies, to deeply consider those struck by a roiling and raging Coronavirus. In these poems, a beloved child comes first, and yet our world, which can feel so lost, so terminal, Cortney gathers close-in too.

-John Fox, author of Poetic Medicine: The Healing Art of Poem-Making

In this searingly beautiful collection of poems, Cortney Davis asks a question: Where are the other mothers who have lost their daughters, who might be my guides and mentors? Then, Davis' guide begins to appear. In the arduous, anguishing labor of intimate remembering, the poet-healer summons forth herself as mentoring guide.

-Kathleen Noone Deignan, CND, Founding Director of the Deignan Institute for Earth and Spirit at Iona College

These poems are searing, poignant, clear-eyed, and resonant...The collection is a tribute to familial love, and ultimately to one particular person, separated by the worsening pandemic, and dealing with the ravages of metastatic breast cancer. The volume is slender and can be read at one go. Even so, the individual poems are worthy of revisiting.

-Audrey Shafer, LITMED, Literature Arts Medicine Database