by Laurel Feigenbaum

Matrimony is the story of a long marriage, a family, and the inevitable changes that occur over time. Married for 66 years when her husband passed away, the poet shares her journey of learning to live alone for the first time, her grief, and recognition of the natural aging process as it affects us all.

About the Author

Laurel Feigenbaum was born and raised in San Francisco and Beverly Hills. She holds a BA in English Literature from UC Berkeley, and an MA in Educational Research and Psychology. She credits her interest in poetry to Wordsworth and her father who loved wordplay, and often quoted lines he admired or found useful. After family and careers in education and business, she gathered what she refers to as “late-life courage” and began writing in class and workshop settings. Writing for her is a way of exploring and coping with the often-absurd world in which we live, and the inevitable changes that come with a long life or any life.

Matriarch of her family now, she is the mother of three, grandmother of seven and great-grandmother of two. She is a past board member of the Marin Poetry Center and author of The Daily Absurd. She received Honorable Mention for work from the Highland Park poetry challenge, and Ida Coolbrith Circle. Her work also appears on-line, Women For Change Poetry Sunday.

Advance Praise

“Matrimony’s gorgeous elegy to a husband casts a tender and unflinching eye into aging, illness, and love’s ‘armory of memory.’ These poems speak to the natural absolute of death with Yeatsian candor, but they also remind me of contemporary masters of the short form—Jane Kenyon and Jean Valentine—in their precision. Feigenbaum’s accuracy also calls to mind the photographer Cartier-Bresson’s ‘decisive moment,’ in which spontaneous and ephemeral events record, in one deft impress, the essence of pure feeling. I’m so grateful to these poems for lessons in how to write, and, more importantly, how to live.”

~ Jane Miller, acclaimed poet & author of Who is Trixie the Trasher? and Other Questions

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by Meg Lindsay

Inspired by the doctor and poet, William Carlos Williams, who wrote poetry on his prescription pad when on house calls, the poems in Notes from a Caregiver originated in waiting rooms and doctors’ offices when Meg Lindsay’s husband collapsed with multiple myeloma, a cancer, causing bone fractures. Lindsay writes of her personal journey as a caregiver, not clichés and ‘feel good’ sayings, which can be isolating and make one feel inadequate. Instead, she uses poetry to reveal authentic emotions, often odd and unpredictable, ranging from compassion to despair to anger and even to humor.

Enjoy a video of Meg reading from the book:

Meg Lindsay — A Featured Poet on The Poetry Box LIVE (July 2021)

About the Author

A semi-finalist in two “Discovery”/The Nation Contests and a finalist in an Inkwell competition, Meg Lindsay has had poems published in Tricycle, Pivot, Salamander, Alimentum, Connecticut River Review, etc. and earned an MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College.

Because she is also an established painter showing for decades in galleries and museums, her chapbook about the emotions and difficulties of painting, A Painter’s Night Journal, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2016.  Writers love to write about paintings, but most writers confine themselves to the subject matter of a painting, not the process, since after all most do not paint.

The subject of her writing dramatically changed direction when her husband, an athlete never ill before, collapsed with cancer in his bones, multiple myeloma, that same year. She gained direct knowledge of what it means to be a caregiver, a different and extraordinarily difficult learning process from anything she had ever known before.

<www.meglindsayartist.com>

Advance Praise

In Notes from a Caregiver, Meg Lindsay reveals the deep truth about what happens in a woman’s world, inner and outer, when her husband and life-partner is diagnosed with multiple myeloma, cancer of plasma and bones. With white-hot honesty and emotional clarity, she faces into the authentic core of her experience.

In the midst of a deeply personal, life-altering crisis, Ms. Lindsay engages the authority of a skilled and practiced poet to show us the effects of this illness upon patient, caregiver-life partner, and the deep bond at the core of a long-tern marriage. She uses her personal struggle to come to terms with the trauma contained in her experience to guide us into and through the difficult transformations, which occur when one is confronted with the challenges of living with cancer, be she, or he, patient or caregiver.

Notes from a Caregiver is a ‘must read’ for anyone, caregiver, patient, family member, or friend, who finds herself or himself in the chaos of a critical illness. I wish I had had it to accompany me when I was the primary caregiver for my husband in similar circumstances. In addition, as a psychotherapist in private practice, I see Meg Lindsay’s book of poems as a guide for medical professionals, psychotherapists, and technicians, who treat people suffering from life-threatening illnesses, and their families. We can all become more educated to the sensitivities, and vulnerabilities, of the psychic shock that comes with this territory.

Just as Dante called upon Virgil, his poet-ancestor, to guide him into and through the Inferno, so Meg Lindsay calls on her own poetic genius to accompany her, and then she, in turn, carries us in and through the Valley of the Shadow of Death and beyond.

—Bonnie L. Damron, PhD, LCSW, Archetypal Pattern Analyst

When a wife suddenly becomes her husband’s caregiver, everything changes—”because the rules of this road are different.” In poems that are brutally realistic and deeply tender, poet and painter Meg Lindsay tells us what it’s like when this new road is traveled. When her husband, collapsed with aggressive Multiple Myeloma, neither was prepared for the journey ahead. Just as Doctor William Carlos Williams wrote poems in between patients, Lindsay writes in exam rooms and waiting rooms, writes as her husband receives infusions and endures tests—and her poems tell of a new marital intimacy, one that emerged from the physical tending required by bed bath and commode, and from the emotional support demanded by a spouse’s pain and disabilities. These are important and moving poems, beautifully transparent, and a roadmap for others who may be walking this same unfamiliar path.

—Cortney Davis, author of Taking Care of Time
(Winner, Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize, University of Michigan Press)

Through her capacity for deep and sustained attention, Meg Lindsay has transformed the burdens of caregiving into a strange sort of beauty. Small, painfully human moments and mundane tasks reverberate with profound meaning. We can feel Lindsay using language to heal the rupture that illness has created, and thus, her poetry becomes a salve for all of us, who will inevitably experience the suffering of someone we love. Notes from a Caregiver offers comfort, companionship, wisdom, and even humor, to those on caregiving’s arduous journey. Lindsay’s writing teaches us that to look closely and to struggle to put what we see and experience into words, is a powerful form of love.

—Charlotte Friedman, Adjunct Professor,
Narrative Medicine, Barnard College, Columbia University

Meg Lindsay’s poems are deeply moving and sometimes even humorous. Each verse guides us through the twists and turns of a bone cancer diagnosis too late to avert injury, treatment, repair. Her words gently illuminate the arduous road she and her husband are traveling and the continuous dialog between caregiver and patient. Their unrelenting partnership and love offer us a way forward.

—Jen Walker, Attorney, Literacy Advocate and Multiple Myeloma Caregiver

This new collection, Notes from a Caregiver by Meg Lindsay, is laden with imagistic gems which brave the paradox of hope, when the “facts” are not in your favor. But there remains hope to this author, and hopelessness, inexpressible will and work and grief—all as true as any “fact.” Lindsay writes “Death is a dash/or could it be…. Theoretically.” I love the provocative questions which Lindsay insists be answered—answered with a dash—
This is a large-hearted, beautifully sequenced, well-crafted, and careful collection.

—Kate Knapp Johnson, poet, author of The Wind-Bike

“These poems are fierce, passionate paeans to love—love of self and love for a beloved husband whose sickness has interfered but not destroyed the intensity of the relationship.”

—Julie Bondanza, Jungian Analyst

Book Launch & Readings

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by Debbie Hall

A Poetry Box Chapbook Prize Winner – Third Place, 2019

“How many close calls before we become ghosts?” wonders the author of this collection, where she reflects upon her experiences—emotional, relational and spiritual–during her partner’s yearlong battle with a life-threatening illness. Threaded throughout these poems is the presence of the natural world—always a source of solace, but now more acutely and deeply felt.

About the Author

Debbie Hall is a psychologist, photographer and writer who lives in southern California with her partner and two vocal and talented rescue cats. She and her partner share a passion for traveling the world.  She feels incredibly fortunate to have had the time and means to launch a second career as a poet after retiring from psychological practice.  Debbie completed her MFA in 2017 at Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon.  She considers poets her rock stars.

Debbie’s poetry has appeared in a number of literary journals and anthologies, including the San Diego Poetry Annual, Serving House Journal, Sixfold, Poets Reading the News, Poetry24, Bird’s Thumb, Califragile, Gyroscope Review and Hawaii Pacific Review. Her essays have appeared on NPR (This I Believe series), in USD Magazine, and the San Diego Union Tribune.  She received an honorable mention in the 2016 Steve Kowit Poetry Prize and won second place in the 2018 Poetry Super Highway contest. Her first poetry collection, What Light I Have, was published in 2018 by Main Street Rag Books and was a finalist in the 2019 San Diego Book Awards. She is thrilled that her chapbook, Falling Into The River, just won third place in the 2019 Poetry Box Chapbook Prize.

What They’re Saying  . . .

Falling into the River is a book of remarkable candor and tenderness. Faced with a somber “unexpected detour,” Debbie Hall has forged poetry that is deeply attentive and hopeful. Near misses and nimbus clouds hijacking the sky are offset by gifts from nature and the poet’s playfulness. Hall gives us the egret, “lustrous with first light,” and weeds, “resplendent in their ratty coats.” Surgery is compared to the pas de trois in a ballet, and mortality appears as a gorilla in a tutu. These poems are delightful: intimate, unflinching, and imbued with love.

­—Rebecca Patrascu, Before Noon

When immeasurable fear arrives on the shores of poetry it is sometimes greeted with neither aversion nor welcome. Despite its alarming unease and three hundred mile per hour winds—the call to respond, repair, and interpret is the poet’s duty. This new poetry collection by Debbie Hall, Falling Into the River, documents a couple’s processing of shared weakening and fear. These are poems with spines. “Words you can barely form / with your own mouth, / vocabulary that you must now / make your own.” Hall is gifted with a language that is rich in observation and conveys it with profound courage and tenderness—“Here, sit in my lap now.”

—Sam Roxas-Chua,
Saying Your Name Three Times Underwater

Language formed from ache, perseverance and enlightenment construct Hall’s poems: a cancer survivor’s grateful soul mate who comes back from a despairing precipice—love’s shared journey—to discover in these intimate poems that even a long life is short. We learn, too, how the residential soul survives for illumination, to know endurance is born from restoration and hope. Poems to remind us that we fall to get up and go on, mostly, a little more stooped, but thankfully keen to the transient world, each day sanctified with “…the calculus of near misses / allotted each of us.”

—Jeff Walt, Leave Smoke

Falling into the River, Debbie Hall’s newest collection, is a graceful and unflinching telling of the perilous medical journey of the poet’s longtime love. This is a poet with a gift for staying present no matter what. She knows herself and she knows her heart, and in that knowing we come to know ourselves as well. As readers we are up-close witnesses to every phase: the anxious wait for results; vigilance during the partner’s illness and treatment; self-questioning about how to best offer comfort; and ultimately the return of her partner to health. With the instincts of a tracker and all senses on high alert, Debbie Hall never strays from the natural world, which provides inspiration, hope, solace and even distraction when needed. Hall’s brilliance with extended metaphor will dazzle you. Look what she does with the jigsaw puzzle, the fire bulletin, Swan Lake, the tomatoes! Oh, the tomatoes! These poems portray a shared life lived with gusto, through times of ecstatic contentment, despair and renewal. This collection is a celebration of life and love—a testament to treasure.

—Lin Nelson Benedek,
When a Peacock Speaks to You in a Dream

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