Description

“Joel Savishinsky’s stories and visceral imagery show us how we deepen by enduring.”

—Ellen Hirning Schmidt, author of Oh, Say Did You Know

Our Aching Bones, Our Breaking Hearts

Poems on Aging

by Joel Savishinsky

We confront our own aging long before we ourselves become old. Through the roles we play as family, friends, or caregivers to our elders, we learn to anticipate our own later years. Drawing on the author’s half-century career in gerontology and anthropology, the poems of Our Aching Bones, Our Breaking Hearts explore the physical, emotional, and spiritual impact of the aging experience on the nurses and patients, parents and grandparents, retirees and volunteers, Holocaust survivors and roommates, and elderly spouses and mourners he has known.

The poet shares stories in a variety of settings, which include a summer camp, an orchard, a national park, a nursery and a nursing home, hospitals, an older couple’s marital bed, and the steps of a small-town front porch. At the core of these stories stand the aging body and mind, the well-worn heart, deep reservoirs of humor, love, and anger, and the longing, defiance, regret and gratitude of life’s concluding decades.

Early Praise for Our Aching Bones, Our Breaking Hearts:

Infused with passion, resentment, frustration, and love, without undue gloom or false cheer, Joel Savishinsky’s poetry captures the essential conundrum of life: whether we rage or go gently, the light will die. Savishinsky inhabits characters immersed in their own, and others’ experiences. He captures the essential irony, that the body almost always fails the mind, that we need more than safe shelter to maintain our spirits, and that trading the pain of living for mindless security is a fool’s bargain. Whether speaking as the main character or an observer, these poems ring true and prescient.

—D Ferrara, founder of San Fedele Press,
editor of Art in the Time of COVID-19

We, the babies of the 1940s, thought we’d beaten the aging game with our potions, meditations, and mindful walks in parks. Our body’s betrayal shocks as it brings “a looseness in the valves, a tightening in the joints.” Forever young, these truths hurt. “I knew in a new way that my sons…would now never cease to worry and so had made me old.” This collection, Our Aching Bones, Our Breaking Hearts: Poems on Aging, finds the pathos, the epiphanies, and light for a darkening path because though aging and death are old news, this contradiction, this broken contract, is happening to us for the first time and we need a little help from our friends.

—Sandra L Kleven, editor of Cirque,
author of Defiance Street and Holy Land

Joel Savishinsky’s stories and visceral imagery show us how we deepen by enduring. He explores lifelong aging by turning his close-up lens on sleep, breath, identity, and sense of well…being. He shares with us a deep devotion to walking the walk with vulnerable people, an unflinching willingness to visit the places frail bodies and tensile spirits reside. His poetic grace and dexterity astonish me. You will long remember the kindness and depth of this highly skilled poet.

—Ellen Hirning Schmidt, author of Oh, Say Did You Know,
winner of the Helen Kay Poetry Chapbook Prize,
director of the Writing Room Workshops

 

About the Author:

When Joel Savishinsky published the first poem from this collection at age 40, he was a young anthropologist and gerontologist who never thought he’d grow old. Four decades later, now a grandfather and family elder, he smiles at his earlier lack of imagination. For half a century, his research and teaching have taken him to live with elders in Arctic Canada, the Caribbean, a working-class borough in North London, South Indian villages, and American retirement communities and geriatric facilities, places where he has come to love the grit, humor, passion, outrage, and honest perplexity of older people.

He is the author of The Ends of Time: Life and Work in a Nursing Home and Breaking the Watch: The Meanings of Retirement in America, both of which won the Gerontological Society of America’s Richard Kalish Award (book-of-the-year prize). Since retiring, he has been transforming his experiences with the aging into poetry, short fiction and essays. A Pushcart Prize nominee, his work has appeared in American Writers Review, Blood and Thunder, Cirque, The Examined Life Journal, The New York Times, The Poeming Pigeon, Soul-Lit, and Windfall. He and his wife Susan live in Seattle, doing community and political work, while also helping to raise five grandchildren. A recovering academic and unrepentant activist, this is his first collection of poetry.