Limited Editions

Carole Stone’s Limited Editions is an end-of-life, narrative journey from long-term marriage to the illness and death of her husband to what comes after. Stone’s honest, understated, crisp poems of observation and detail, each packed with story, bring us to the heart of her loss. She does not flinch in her descriptions of her husband’s suffering and dying moments. Stone challenges the reader to think about death, grief, widowhood, and aging as natural processes in the life cycle. With love and attention, she guides us through the process of grief and–crucially–recovery: to newfound moments of quiet beauty, to the delicate intricacies of self-care and preparing meals for one, and even to unexpected flirtation in the park. 

Carole Stone is Distinguished Professor of English, Emerita, at Montclair State University. She has published five books of poetry and four chapbooks, among them Traveling with the Dead (Backwaters Press), American Rhapsody (CavanKerry Press, 2012), and Limited Editions (CavanKerry Press, 2023). Her recent work has appeared in Blue Fifth Journal, Slab, Bellevue Literary Review, and Nimrod. Her book, No Happy Ruins, was one of five finalists in the Laura Boss Narrative Poetry Contest. She has won three fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and a fellowship to the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford University, England.

End of the Line

You lie in the hospital bed,
eyes closed, waiting—
no hurry.

Got off at the last stop.
Stripped of everything,
you remember no one,

no place or thing.
Don’t call.
Never make a sound.

You have no wrinkles, no fat.
I’ve started to wear
your Woonsocket

and U of Penn T-shirts.
It is the empty house,
the quiet, that kills.

Living Is All

You don’t come to me in dreams.
Perhaps you’ve found another woman
in the sky where the polygamous gods live.

Here on earth at the feeder,
a hummingbird flaps its wings.
I have eggs for breakfast.

Find a book of world poetry
at the thrift shop. Only $5.00.
On the bay beach, shells under my feet,

I pick up a snail, brush it clean
with my fingers. It has no fragrance,
didn’t live long.

I tossed your ashes into this bay,
to think of you when I walk here.
And all the while there is delight.

In Limited Editions, Carole Stone describes the arc of a long marriage, from an initial blind date to a green wedding dress, an Acapulco honeymoon, and all “the ups and downs / of forever.” Those ups and downs ultimately come to include the sometimes painful, sometimes peaceful solitudes of widowhood. Clear-eyed yet tenderhearted, these poems are rich with the details of a shared life—beloved novels, kugel recipes, the Times crossword finished each morning—both as it’s lived and as it’s remembered, and illustrate how a couple can become so intertwined that “Sometimes you were me. / Sometimes I was you.”
—Matthew Thorburn, author of String

Here are the stark, spare poems of grief. Arranged chronologically, they tell a story of first meet to last meal, from “Sometimes you were me. / Sometimes I was you” to the acceptance of “just me”: “This thickening feeling // like the empty lots of my childhood. / There is such a space/ to cross to . . . you,” that “wasteland / I pass through, in love with the earth.” Here are consequentially simple poems—as much for us, whose lives have been rearranged by the “tumultuous tilt of loss,” for those of us “full of those . . . gone”—as they are for the poet: a bare trace, a limited edition.
—Lorna Dee Cervantes, author of April on Olympia

88 pages
Carole Stone
Pub date – November 2023
Trade paper – 6 x 9″
$18
ISBN: 978-1-960327-00-0
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