Dread Islands

By: Sandra Becker

In Dread Islands, Sandra Becker explores the struggles and very existence of a population that poetry has avoided perhaps for the same reasons many of us turn away. Too often we lack the courage to do the kind of looking that those with profound mental challenges deserve. But who better than a poet of Becker's gifts to teach us that to see what we are reluctant to see is to learn new ways to embrace paradox and celebrate the human spirit? In this sense this astounding book is Old Testament. In giving her characters names out of the Bible, Becker does not just protect their anonymity but also paradoxically helps us to recognize them in all their rich diversity and unmistakable dignity. Becker, following the tradition of the psalms, is reminding us of what poetry has long been telling us: that there is more to this world than we had guessed; that, amidst suffering and struggle and the many complications they incite, the mind is much more resilient than we might have dared to believe. Poetry schools us in resilience, whatever dread islands we inhabit. Poems are insular by their very nature; limited and facing the immense world that surrounds them but refusing to be daunted by these limits and this immensity. The book ends with an invocation to Leah, Michael, Noah, Jacob, Miriam, Moses, Sarah, and their compatriots, and by this last page we too are now part of this community, this lost tribe; we too are "longing for something / just beyond reach" facing our own challenging boundaries, our own oceanic responsibilities. -Christopher Bursk, author of The First Inhabitants of Arcadia Sandra Becker's Dread Islands is that rare event in poetry: a page turner. Here is life as we do not wish to see it: the ranks of men and women stricken by severe physical disability and mental illness, unable to live in the world as we know it, but who carry on thanks to those who care for them with endless patience and hope. Sandra Becker is one of those caregivers. This is her story and the story of those she serves. -Lynn Levin, author of Miss Plastique In these poems of boundless compassion and deep humanity, Sandra Becker delves with attention, clarity, and heart into the lives of special needs men and women and their caregiver-narrator. Dread Islands presents us with a double gift: each person populating Becker's poems is precisely, powerfully him or herself-and at the same time, Becker shows us through her generous and loving gaze that there's no essential difference between us. Like Whitman, she helps us to see how we all suffer, we're all here. -Kasey Jueds, author of Keeper

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0692440399
• ISBN13: 9780692440391
• Release Date: May 2015
• Publisher: Aldrich Publishing
• Length: 84 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.2" x 6.0"