Poet and Press 53 Poetry Series editor Tom Lombardo brings together 115 poets from 15 nations with After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events. This brilliant collection bears messages of recovery to its readers from the raw beginnings to long-term acceptance, delivered through the language of poetry: Grief, War, Exile, Abuse, Divorce, Addiction, Injury, Illness, Bigotry, and Loss of Innocence. After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events is filled with clarity of story, emotion, voice, music, and language, with hope that readers will find comfort, guidance, companionship, and healing.

Praise for After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events

Editor Tom Lombardo has assembled nothing less than an atlas of recovery for our time, a book brimming with various maps of the journey through suffering, despair, survival, restoration, and hope. Each poem here glimmers with an experiential and artistic wisdom that shows us how suffering can be endured, how loss can be accepted, and how the meanings of death can be transformed and turned toward an affirmation of life.

—Fred Marchant, author of Full Moon Boat

This international collection of poetry can serve as an aid in promoting compassion and courage. We draw courage from those on a similar path.  Our stories, whether personal or professional, are about transitions, and the story continues to unfold.

—Nicholas Mazza, Ph.D., Editor of Journal of Poetry Therapy

After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events is a book that seeks to stand up and walk among us as a living thing, a force to activate the good and prepare us to weather the bad. Let it stand and not be taken down. Let it live in our lives as readers. 

—Afaa Michael Weaver, author of The Plum Flower Dance

The sum of these poems is to tell the truth and by the telling to find relief and sometimes healing. The ones who read and hear these poems can share the loss that is so common among us, and perhaps also share the healing that comes through bold voice.

—Walter Brueggemann, Ph.D., author of Finally Comes the Poet  

This anthology is of national and international significance. It is a collection that crosses and embraces all boundaries—culture, class, gender, and race. It takes us into the hardest places human beings have to go—the failures of personal relationships, loss of loved ones, genocide, racial oppression, addiction, loss of innocence, marginalization, and more. And, yet, each section moves, finally, toward a place of hope and dignity and resilience.

—Cathy Smith Bowers, Poet Laureate of North Carolina (2010-2012) and author of The Collected Poems of Cathy Smith Bowers