The Dead Tree Garden

A lyrical exploration of grief, caregiving, and maternal love.
 
Now Available at Amazon, Bookshop.org, Syracuse University Press, or Nine Mile Press.
 
Lisa M. Dougherty’s The Dead Tree Garden is a poetry collection “unlike” many a book, a distinction in this case as I’m talking about originality and something more, a kind of ingenuity. I think of Baudelaire: “It always seems to me that I should be happy anywhere but where I am, and this question of moving is one that I am eternally discussing with my soul.”   In poetry the soul is a synonym for the reliquary. We position the furniture of our suffering in the soul’s room. But Dougherty’s poems insist there is life outside containment. 
~Stephen Kuusisto