Outside the Joy - Ruth Awad

Part ode, part elegy, part protection spell, Ruth Awad's Outside the Joy holds at its radiant heart precarity itself. These poems inventory the losses, the mercies, and the small miracles in this life that is not ours for long: Here is the moon as freckled as a mother's skin, and here is the sunlight that arrives//first at your window, quietly pawing/ even when you can't stand it. What a gift to be haunted by these words.

--Maggie Smith, New York Times bestselling author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful nn Outside the Joy is filled with poems that sear with lyric clarity about grief, love, survival, and wonder amid personal loss and environmental collapse. nTracing losses both interpersonal and universal - from a mother's failing heart to environmental and economic decline ravaging ancestral homelands - OUTSIDE THE JOY is a compendium of abundance in a world rife with want. n nWith a voice as singular as it is illuminating, Awad explores the sharp contrasts of our shared existence: the human capacity to hurt and to hold one another, the love and grief that grow from our ephemeral connectedness.

n nThese poems unearth the sacred in the ordinary and invite you to do the same - if only / you'll let the world / soften you with its touching.n nn