Walking Into Lightning

Ellen Laflèche

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After her husband died of ALS in 2014, poet Ellen LaFleche began writing of physical love and loss, of the complications of memory, of the small, personal, persistent sorrows that lived with her every day. These poems push back against clinical theories of bereavement by validating the necessary persistence of grief and remembering. They also challenge platitudes about the easy comfort of memories.

The poem "Unbearable," for example, describes the sensory joys of the couple's honeymoon:

We splurged on fine wine and watched sunset spread
its slow flush across evening's throat...

I tipped a shell against his lips and told him to drink.
Too sandy, he said, too salty, but he swallowed the broth,
wiping his beard with the knuckled swipes of a pre-historic man.

Now, memories of the salty taste of a littleneck clam bring an intense mixture of joy and sorrow.

Memory also fails, erases: "Your face is fading into my brain's neuronal mist," the poet writes, and "I remember how you carried home a bouquet of foliage. /
I don't remember the spider that crawled up your sleeve."

The sensual, recurrent imagery of Walking into Lightning - fire, ocean water, corn fields, thunder, birth, the pleasures of physical love - spiral through the poems, linking them in a long, tangled journey through bereavement and loss.

This is a remarkable book for the bereaved, unsentimental and undistracted, profoundly moving and cathartic.

Book Details

Publisher: Saddle Road Press
Publish Date: Aug 15th, 2019
Pages: 68
Language: English
Edition: undefined - undefined
Dimensions: 9.00in - 6.00in - 0.16in - 0.25lb
EAN: 9781732952126
Categories: • Women Authors• Subjects & Themes - Death, Grief, Loss• American - General

About the Author

Laflèche, Ellen: - Ellen LaFleche is the author of three chapbooks: Workers' Rites (Providence Athenaeum, 2011), Ovarian (Dallas Poets Community Press, 2011), and Beatrice (Tiger's Eye Press, 2013). She has published in diverse journals and websites, including Hunger Mountain, The Ledge, Many Mountains Moving, Mudfish, Harpur Palate, Spoon River Poetry Review, and Naugatuck River Review. She is a recipient of the Ruth Stone Poetry Prize, the Tor House Poetry Prize, the Joe Gouveia Outermost Poetry Prize, the Philbrick Poetry Award, New Millennium Writings Poetry Award, and the Poets on Parnassus Prize for poetry about the medical experience, among others. She lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, and is an assistant judge of the North Street Book Prize at Winningwriters.com.

Praise for this book

Walking into Lightning is a tender, fierce, raging, stunning book that left me breathless. How generous of Ellen LaFlèche to share this intimate love story with the world! Her metaphors go straight to the heart: seagulls hover "like crosses over the waning tides;" dawn is "a languid unfurl, / a woman releasing her hair pin by pin from her nape;" and an IV bag is "a goblin's bobbling head." The tension between the sensual and the sorrowful makes this book stand out from other poetry collections about loss and death. Walking into Lightning is an extraordinary collection that teaches us how to live each moment to the fullest.
--Lesléa Newman, author of I Carry My Mother and Lovely

Rich, sensuous, "steam lifting off your shoulders like a departing spirit," these poems by a new widow bring the moment of a husband's last days and death into poetic and spiritual focus. "Dying," the poet reminds the reader, "might be like that." As it was, as I believe it was--though I needed these poems to remind me, as they have reminded her, and to let us both breathe out again.
--Jane Yolen, author of The Radiation Sonnets and Owl Moon

The title of Ellen LaFlèche's Walking into Lightning aptly describes the experience of reading her book. Poem after poem, the reader is dazzled by her sensuous imagery and emotional intelligence--by her poignant depiction of what it means to have loved another person "body and soul." At a time when I seem to be surrounded by widows, LaFlèche gave me illuminating glimpses of a sorrow beyond my present ken and of an intimacy that defies commiseration.
--Garret Keizer, author of The World Pushes Back

Crackling with desire and grief, Walking Into Lightning is an unforgettable collection. The poems are at once visually beautiful and viscerally sensual, laced together by the sinew of longing. They burn deep to cauterize the unfathomable loss of the beloved. I have long admired Ellen LaFlèche's poetry, but the poems in this book are tough butterflies unfurling new and scorched wings from fiery cocoons, immolating everyone who witnesses their transformation. LaFlèche's imagery is as unsentimental as it is brilliantly inventive. "I feel your soul detaching from your body, / a wrenching ache like tendons pulled slow from bone." As she grapples with her husband's illness and excruciating death, we, too, are forced to deal with the abyss of loss. If not for the immaculate craft of this fine poet, these courageous poems would be unbearable. As it is, they are benedictions of love that allow us to go on.
--Pamela Uschuk, author of Blood Flower and Crazy Love