'What Loss Taught Me' by Stephen Furlong

"I want to believe I might come back new"

Stephen Furlong received his M.A in English from Southeast Missouri State University. His poetry, book reviews, and interviews have appeared in Yes, Poetry, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, and Pine Hills Review, among others. He currently works at FIVE:2:ONE as a staff reviewer and can be found @StephenJFurlong on Twitter.

[ cover art by Jennifer Walton ]
[ limited edition print run of 125 copies ]

These are brave poems that have a remarkable immediacy of voice. They mourn; they bear witness; they warn. While about abuse, they transcend their topic. In the end they do what all compelling poems must – speak to what it means to be human in all its facets, both good and bad.
–Sue William Silverman, Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You (University of Georgia Press)

If you want to know what tenderness means, and what it looks like, and how it graces the lines of a poem, you should read Stephen Furlong's What Loss Taught Me. If you want to know the courage of tenderness, or the way it can be turned toward the self, you should read this. These poems take the hard risk of being honest, and vulnerable, of making out of deep, impossible hurt a kind of home. They inhabit and transcend the wounds that make up our everyday. When I lift my eyes from the page and look around, I see how everything is capable of holding some kind of violence, some kind of beauty, and some kind of love. Stephen's work is a work of grace in that way. "Eventually, love," he writes, and I say yes. But also: the love is here. In the aftermath of cruelty, violence, and fear, Stephen has brought it out. No more eventually. This book ushers love back into the world.
–Devin Kelly, In This Quiet Church of Night I Say Amen (CCM Press)