The Art of Departure

By Maureen Deponty

Power. Pow! Her! These poems will punch you in the heart, grab your mind mightily. Sherbondy wears Wonder Woman boots and they can kick you alive with love, loss and just plain living. She's 'touching fire to land once kissed and tended,' 'a scarecrow swallowing a wallow of stars.' She's iron fisted, heavy hammered and she knows her name. You will too. Stunning work from a poet whose praises cannot help but be sung. -Ruth Moose, Author of Doing It at the Dixie Dew From a long marriage that crashes and burns to a humorous look at first date disasters after divorce, the bold poems in The Art of Departure are smart and sassy with a fierce beauty that transforms loss and longing. 'What was there before departure?' Maureen Sherbondy asks in the book's first poem 'Meditation on Leaving.' The poems that follow do not so much attempt to answer that question, as to confront and come to a reckoning with loss, whether that loss is a baby bird that fell from the nest, the death of a father, or the end of a marriage. '...jump / and hope to fly,' she writes in the poem 'Fly.' Yes, indeed, these poems fly straight to the heart of anyone who has experienced loss. -Pat Riviere-Seel, Author of Nothing Below But Air When we think of the word art we might first think of a painting, a poem, or a musical score. But art is also a branch of learning. A skill. In The Art of Departure, Maureen Sherbondy uses her art, as a poet, to show us there is an art to leaving; to surviving deaths, divorce, and the redefinition of the self. -Jessie Carty, Author of Practicing Disaster

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0692533486
• ISBN13: 9780692533482
• Release Date: November 2015
• Publisher: Aldrich Press
• Length: 78 Pages
• Weight: 0.38 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.2" x 6.0"