Extremely Yours
Extremely Yours
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Those featured in Extremely Yours—most prominently, the author—are all reckoning with extreme or misunderstood medical diagnoses. Though contextualized by history and science, it is lived experience and a poetic sensibility that creates this intimate collection of essays. In tracing her journey through marriage, motherhood, four first- and second-trimester losses, and finally, the precarious pregnancy that followed these losses, Susanna Childress excavates grief—and still finds room for joy.
“In EXTREMELY YOURS, Susanna Childress braids personal traumas and literary history—but she doesn’t insist pain is hopeless. These stories carry the reader across the gap between sympathy and knowing. Whether she is writing a glossary for understanding love or navigating the pain of pregnancy loss, Childress models how to breathe through it all; how to take care of ourselves and each other; how all you need for prayer is a name.”
“EXTREMELY YOURS: A Memoir in Fragments is a work of unflinching poetic reportage from the borders of the body, where life and death meet. Susanna Childress plumbs with profound courage the experience of gestation, pregnancy loss, and child-bearing, holding at once the tragic and the miraculous. Childress’ exquisite command of language lights the reader’s path through every step of this gorgeous memoir— where poetry interweaves with prose, love is inseparable from grief, and the machinations of biology are illuminated with the Divine.”
BIO:
Susanna Childress is the author of two poetry collections, Jagged with Love (University of Wisconsin Press) and Entering the House of Awe (New Issues Press). Her creative nonfiction has appeared in The Cincinnati Review, The Idaho Review, The Rumpus, The Indiana Review, The Portland Review, Crazyhorse and has received awards from Iron Horse Literary Review, The Writer’s House at Dairy Hollow, and named “notable” in the Best American Essays. She lives in Holland, Michigan and teaches at Hope College.
“Though Susanna Childress knows all too well the knife’s edge of beginnings and endings, it’s at the joy-infused, spirited center—that resilient ‘core of knowing’—where her words and hard-won wisdom shine most brilliantly.”