Stacey Lynn Brown

The Shallows chronicles the poet's father's illness (the aftermath of a massive stroke) as well as her own (an almost impossible to diagnose debilitating disease). While the poems are deeply personal, anyone who is faced with caring for a loved one, or dealing with their own illness, grief, or even such common challenges as anxiety or depression, will find these verses to be universal in their ability to relate to these all-too-human conditions.

These are not the words of a woman who sat in a hospital waiting room and studied characters, but instead someone who herself lived deep inside the uncertainty, the frustrations, the pain, and the unanswerable questions that haunt us as those we love age and fall ill, or as we ourselves find our own bodies and minds turned upside down by something irrevocable. The terror, the reassurances, the search for something solid to set foot on are all here in breathtaking, sparse verse. The Shallows will take you under again and again, and when you come back up, you'll feel oddly comforted that someone was so capable of capturing how you've felt, that someone said what you couldn't find words for. The Shallows is a hand to hold onto when you feel no one can possibly understand what has, uninvited, enveloped you.
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