Cauterized

As I read the poems in Laura Apol’s newest collection, Cauterized, I feel them existing inside me. This is what I cherish as a reader—to have a poet who skillfully leads me on a journey with her stunning imagery of monarchs, cats, dogs, and the encompassing natural world. Apol weaves beautiful narratives of family, grief, relationships, and the rawness of life always with empathy, always while embracing the lifeblood of existence. She writes, Tonight I am thinking of those things / I didn’t know I should love, and I think—How did I live before these poems? The brilliance of this work changed me in the best ways, both as a poet and person. [Laura Apol has cemented her place among my favorite poets, and once you read Cauterized, you'll understand why.]  —Kelli Russell Agodon, author of Dialogues with Rising Tides

The spirits that hover over and through these poems become entirely incarnate at the poet’s beckoning. The shades, of course, come freighted with questions. There are good ghosts, umbrae of their former or imagined lives with which the poet seems eager to reconnect. Accordingly, the work traffics in the essential rather than accessory dynamics of love and grief, faith and its failings—a brave endeavor, to bring such things to light.  —Thomas Lynch, author of Bone Rosary: New and Selected Poems

Laura Apol’s Cauterized is a lovely collection of poetry. Rich imagery sets the stage through which the emotional reveal packs its punch. Poems of grief and loss, of the victories and failures within relationships both familial and romantic, of the vicissitudes of being alive in this wondrously tangled existence remind us all to pay close attention, to learn the songs of nature, and to fully inhabit the possible. Brava.  —Pia Täavila-Borsheim, author of Above the Birch Line

In the opening poem of Laura Apol’s riveting new collection, the speaker looks for a lost dog along railroad tracks. The dog is “the last thing / among last things” and the act of searching brings her to a vanishing point: “to the place where the rails come together / almost out of sight.” Apol considers the bridges her father once built: “the kind that take a soul / across a stream.” She describes a voicemail message from her late daughter: “Those last words, curled like / a fist, like an infant’s ear.”] In Cauterized, Laura Apol brings us poems that are both intimate and honest; she gives us deeply beautiful poems filled with sorrow and wonder.  —Faith Shearin, author of Lost Language