This Morning the Mountain

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Judy Rowe Michaels' sixth bout of cancer coincided with a deeper grief: her husband's sudden death, the end of a forty-four-year marriage. Yet the poems in This Morning the Mountain, in their various turnings, reveal unexpected moments of comfort, resilience, even laughter: the pet cat's growling capture of a broiled shrimp, "like the fierce hunter he was meant to be"; an arresting improvisation by a favorite jazz pianist; a prisoner's empathic insight about a poem-"I guess cancer could be a prison too." Ranging from villanelle to prose poem to irregular stanzas that surge, stumble, or sprawl across a page, these poems find the music to explore not only our natural fears of loneliness, insufficiency, heartbreak, and death but the celebration of love.