The Bonds We Keep

Karin Hoffecker has an M.A. in English Literature from Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan. Her poems have appeared in The Comstock Review, The MacGuffin, Mona Poetica, Passager, Peninsula Poets, and Penumbra. Her collection, The Nell Poems, was published by Blue Light Press in 2018. She is a retired teacher who enjoys yoga, reading, and spending time with her granddaughter. This collection is written for all those who are here and away. She lives in Birmingham, Michigan. ENDORSEMENTS "I was invited to drop into the spaces between loss, grief and healing in Karin's poetry. She carried me through generations of loved ones and significant teachers with her words of longing, tenderness and appreciation. The dull ache I sensed from the moment of reading her first lines followed me through to the end. Like so many lives, this collection ended before I was ready."- Sandra F. Johnson, Licensed Social Worker, Licensed Family and Marital Therapist "Given over to appreciating the relationships that shape us and the beauty of the world we share, these poems undertake an archeology, examining lives lost: a son, a mother, a brother and friends. Hats, paintings, jewelry, a brooch-objects become suffused with association, so what one poem calls "the science" of a son's life becomes also the art of life, these poems acting like "talismans" by means of which we can learn to go on being what we are in the midst of loss. In this perceptive and carefully wrought work, presence begins to accompany absence. The bonds we keep become the bonds which also keep us, so that in the end we endure together."- Edward Haworth Hoeppner, Author of Rain Through High Windows, Ancestral Radio, Blood Prism