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Poetry. Women's Studies. "Ruth Handel's MOMENTARY STAYS is a remarkable hybrid of lyric, documentary poetics, and inspiration for teachers. Drawing on seven years of poetry workshops with women in a psychiatric hospital, Handel assembles a rich and moving account of the growing recognition, from both teacher and participants, that 'We need these proxies, / more fluent than ourselves.' Poems that record the patients' impressions appear alongside masterpieces by Blake, Keats, and Dickinson, as well as references to poems by Maya Angelou, Stanley Kunitz, and others. Dynamic and polyphonic, the book presents layers of listening and response with careful fidelity to the difficulty and complexity of the tasks at hand: how to 'voice an old pain,' how to abide 'terrible knowledge,' how to access and reclaim 'the life spark of humor, / which can shine out anywhere, for anyone.' Handel acknowledges the tenuous line between illness and health, the constant flux of light and dark—Blake's 'lamb and beast'—behind what appears to be a stable self. 'Which cards of identity will prove I belong on the outside?' she asks wryly, finding herself one day without egress from the locked ward. Bearing witness to ongoing struggles for self-actualization and recovery, these shared encounters nonetheless offer sustaining hope in the transformative power of poetry: 'We walk in its air, / sensing a portal.'" —B.K. Fischer
