the hook-switch goodbye, Poems by Christine Brooks

In Christine Brooks’ collection, good-byes come as both grace and grief in these poems’ elegant, piercing lines.

Sample Poems by Christine Brooks

“Out of the historic time when our lives were ‘put on hold, frozen shuttered sheltered and quarantined,’ Christine Brooks pulled poems out of the depths of grief over the sudden and solitary loss of her father, taken from this life by a plague that changed our world. Every word becomes a necessity, every phrase captures sorrow as it comes in waves, like wondering what keeps her awake and finding out it’s because ‘I wake to find you dead all over again.’In putting together mourning memories that ‘plagued’ her, Christine welcomes us into her grief and ours, the shared grief over losing loved ones to a disease that lived in the air we breathed. With a handful of soulfully chosen words, Christine Brooks transforms the worst of times into a work of art, granting her and us the peace which surpasses understanding. During the worst viral outbreaks of his lifetime, Shakespeare wrote King Lear and Macbeth. Christine Brooks wrote the hook switch goodbye.”—Karol Jackowski, author of Sister Karol’s Book of Spells, Blessings, and Folk Magic.

“This collection of poems is full of life, death, and everything in between. The writer shares raw, pure emotions that most of us have experienced. It makes me feel the true kinship of being part of something important. I can relate to each and every poem as she takes us on a personal journey that makes me think about so many aspects of my own adventure called life.” —Jenn Daponde

“In this collection of 18 powerful ever-glowing flash poems, Christine Brooks keeps alive the flame love received from her father, including as he slipped from life in a hospital room she could not visit, and opens the life-battered door of her heart to bring forth a powerful addition to the canon of Covid-19 literature. Poet and parent and their ‘small house on a loud street’ are drawn in 3-D, readers effortlessly seeing the hyacinth ‘tip their grape caps/ to dining room windows’ beyond which a lonely daughter has made the banana pancakes that were her father’s specialty. We watch him polka with dress pants rolled to display his white socks, taste the fear as a pandemic thickly covers the globe like the snow the poet shovels from her walk. We hear her father’s last phone call’s request to let out the dog, taste the daughter’s cup of coffee gone cold again and again, and feel the rock that ‘with enough whiskey and weed/ looks like a heart’ and prevents her from punching anything or everything. The dedication and a poem acknowledging a sisterhood that ‘gathered ‘round/ and carried me through’ are fitting bookends in this book containing work that also did the same.”—Suzanne Strempek Shea, author of Songs from a Lead-Lined Room

ISBN: 978-1625494504, 36 pages

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