Sundress Publications announces the release of Florence by Bess Cooley. Cooley’s debut poetry collection is an artful and touching collection of poems with piercing meditations on loss, time, and memory. Cooley’s speaker muses about how changes in the body and brain can alter identity, faced with their own body’s vulnerabilities and the difficulty of aiding a grandfather through dementia. Intimately linked with the speaker’s journey, the poems are a stunning portrayal of the wishes, regrets, and intricacies of a mind’s lifetime.
Marianne Borush says of the collection, “The lost, those beloved and otherwise, live in this book—what to do with human ashes past and future; a grandfather playing the grandfather in Heidi as he climbs the mountain of childhood’s basement stairs; how a life ends when someone else’s does. ‘Show me the bright planets,’ this poet nevertheless insists, time-traveling back fearless, full of calm urgency. These poems haunt even themselves. Concerning an IV drip, courtesy of generous strangers: ‘How long before my blood’s mine again?’ Bess Cooley asks. And the world multiplies and deepens.”
Pre-orders for Florence are available here!
Bess Cooley is a winner of The Mississippi Review Poetry Prize and her work has also appeared in Prairie Schooner, Western Humanities Review, American Literary Review, The Journal, and Verse Daily, among other journals. She is co-founding editor of Peatsmoke Journal and teaches at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
