Afterglow eBk

Afterglow is a poetry of love born, lost and then regained. With meticulous and lyric detail, Laura Jan Shore examines her relationship with her husband from a myriad of angles like a painter contemplating the lifelines of her subject, conveying deeply felt emotion but without the shorthand of sentimentality. This is about love that endures beyond the confines of mortal time. By the author of Water Over Stone.

No one knows how many times we’re born / or why, life after life, this joy and devastation. This is the mystery explored again and again in Laura Jan Shore’s beautifully written and fully imagined poems that comprise Afterglow. She revisits her dead husband, and he revisits her in various guises, times, places and voices, each a facet of the many person-ed selves we are and have been to one another during this lifetime and into the next. The wisdom in these poems is startling and snaps us into and out of dream. Shore reminds us poem by poem: You know you’re here to be /
broken. Nothing to fix.

– Dorianne Laux, author, Only As the Day is Long: New and Selected

My ears throb / with listening. / Your silence, / my uproar.
Afterglow is at once a reckoning with loss and a celebration of what has been lost and the richness that remains. It honours a love story with two endings, the second one final. You will find raw grief transmuted into startling poems. Intertwined with death and its seismic aftermath are sensual pleasures recalled, humour alongside sorrow and anger, and a poignant portrait of one much-loved.

– Tricia Dearborn, author, Autobiochemistry