Orphans

In Orphans, a verse memoir, poet psychologist Joan Cusack Handler explores our most primitive and ambivalent relationships—those with aging parents—meanwhile confronting her own mortality. In a life lesson we’re often unprepared for, Handler presents the reversal of roles and the eruption of unresolved conflicts that persist from childhood.

As the founder of CavanKerry Press, Joan Cusack Handler is a poet and memoirist, a psychologist in clinical practice, and a blogger for PsychologyToday.com (“Of Art and Science”). Her poems have been widely published and have received awards from The Boston Review and five Pushcart nominations. A Bronx native, she has four published books with CavanKerry –GlOrious (2003), The Red Canoe: Love In Its Making (2008), Confessions of Joan the Tall: A Memoir (2012), and Orphans (2016) – and currently resides in Brooklyn and the East Hamptons. Joan is married to a great man and fellow psychologist, has a loving son and daughter-in-law, and two amazing granddaughters.

“In her verse memoir Orphans, Joan Cusack Handler tackles the big subjects – family history, aging parents, Irish Catholicism, belief and unbelief, and her own impending mortality – with a fierce, wrenching fearlessness.  She creates portraits of her mother and father that are fully rounded, alive, and moving, the central question for the poet not “Who am I?” but “Who were they?” “Our terrors take over pilot us through/this most shaking of times…,” writes Handler with force and grace, recognizing that the bright and the dark, love and the absence of love, must always coexist with each other. Orphans is a brave, searchingly honest, and compassionate book.”
— Elizabeth Spires

March 2016
184 pp
Trade paper – 8.5 X 8.5
$18
978-1-933880-56-3
Memoir