"Writers of elegy are compelled to remember their dead, even when they can’t forget them. Therefore, the art’s best practitioners offset despair with a sense of affirmation. They must also articulate universal experience through personal suffering and master aesthetic distance while conveying emotional intensity. Such balances, always hard to strike, are that much more difficult when the poet is a parent mourning the loss of a child. Only the bravest bard risks that charge—and the relentless focus Sheryl St. Germain invests in The Small Door of Your Death proves she’s very brave indeed. With unwavering restraint, she records and deconstructs her son Gray’s losing battle to heroin using an original, disciplined language to express maternal anxiety. The remarkable control with which she handles her subject does not disguise or dampen moments of searing pain." —Brooklyn Rail "The writing here lingers, full of beauty and pain. And as with so much of St. Germain’s work, it’s the precise language and strong voice that make it soar." —Pittsburgh Quarterly Review "In Sheryl St. Germain’s new collection, we find ourselves enthralled by one woman’s attempt to look straight into the eyes of Loss without blinking—to speak, without stuttering, grief’s true name—a name none of us wants to know, though we always listen for its inevitable approach. St. Germain’s work teaches us how to talk back, how to talk through the intimate agonies that, in many ways, define what it means to be human now. Muriel Rukeyser said poetry cannot save us but it is the kind of thing that could. I think this book is proof of that." —Tim Seibles "In this brilliant, wrenchingly beautiful book, Sheryl St. Germain limns the unbearable death of her son via overdose, the agonizing history of her family’s addictions, and her own fragile recovery. With astonishing lyricism, she gives us 'snow and its dark sister: a kind of brutal cold that stings you awake.' She gives us an 'Ode to Needles,' in which the needles of White Spruce and Lodgepole Pine become the needles both she and her son used to inject drugs. And in 'Versions of Heaven,' she takes us to a place where her musician son might be “showing the gone ones…how to scat god’s breath.” This book is an invaluable companion for anyone who has wrestled with addiction, or lost a loved one to it. St. Germain knows both the rawness of grief, and the ways we must find to go on living. She can help us learn." —Ruth L. Schwartz "These poems chronicle the passage of a mother and her son into the abyss of drugs, sorrow, confusion, hope, despair, and love. The mother’s voice struggles to bear witness, to be present, forgoing excuses while trying to answer why, the question that rings a million times in mothers’ hearts throughout the world, to forever cycle and orbit into every cell of the compassionate and caring heart. This collection gives us answers in gray, neither black nor white, but as they must be in our human experience, gray as the dawn that precedes the rising sun." —Jimmy Santiago Baca
