Theresa Senato Edwards

RELEASE DATE: NOVEMBER 11, 2022, WITH BOOK LAUNCH NOVEMBER 17

 

Praise for Becoming Couldn't Sing for Anyone, (Small Harbor Publishing, 2022)

 

The poems in Becoming Couldn’t Sing for Anyone exist in the secret, unspoken cracks between sisters and daughters. Theresa Senato Edwards writes vulnerability into her very syntax. These poems explore the space of memory, “because your mind is wings,” and from the fragments of domestic violence, illness, abortion, and motherhood, Edwards crafts an ethereal language that cuts close to the bone. ~ Jessica Cuello

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This symphonic collection describes a life threaded with loss, which could have dwindled into silence. “But you chose speech, and your mouth would not muzzle / a girl’s belief in herself.” Edwards wields phrasing and sculpts lines with careful, sustained attention, yielding poems that honor trauma’s power without surrendering to its chaos. The provocative use of the second person invites readers to occupy chambers of familial and inter-generational memory, then ultimately propels us toward futures unknown. Becoming Couldn’t Sing for Anyone is a haunting, beautifully realized book. ~ Sandra Beasley

Cutting to the luminous bone of desire in every breathing, aching moment, these poems do not hold back in exposing the pulsing arteries of relationships, and the recoveries from death and loss that make up the totality of time and existence. There is a glorious simultaneity in the way image, feeling and uncompromising insight ignite on every page which never fails to excite, stop the heart and take the breath away. ~ Cyril Wong

In her search for answers, Edwards’ protagonist’s bird-self flies through the stained glass windows of memory and science, and mothers those bloodied, multi-colored shards into a book that works like a septempartite kaleidoscope: each section is a turn of the viewing tube, the reader invited to look through the lens of each poem as the words illuminate the tableau of a multi-selved “you,” a life recollected and reexamined—even reimagined—as that bird, tending the curve and bones of its wings, learns “how to stand / broken but fully healed.” ~ Matthew Hittinger