Nothing More to Lose
Published on 12. January 2021
Book
Paperback/Softback
62 pages
978-1-948461-78-8 (ISBN)
Description
Nothing More to Lose is an intense, hair-raising, and hopeful account of one family's resilience and faith. With poems based on Therese Kolbert Dieringer's autobiography (My Life - Lived and Remembered: A journey across Hungary, Germany, and America), Carolyn Martin tracks the Kolbert family as they escape from Hungary in 1944, endure seven years of starvation and sickness in Germany, and arrive to a new life in America in 1952. Refugees who know neither the language nor landscape, they finally find some semblance of peace in their new home.
Martin knows her subject well. Dieringer is a family friend whose autobiography she edited in 2008. This intimate connection flows through powerful free verse poems that are filled with immediacy, insight, and compassion. Nothing More to Lose will open readers' hearts and minds to the challenges that refugees in every era experience. It will also affirm the power poetry has to bear witness to that suffering and to the strength lying deep within the human spirit.
"Thomas Merton wrote, 'We have all stood in front of that special image that sang to our soul.' Were he alive today and asked for an example, he would hand the person this chapbook." -Wayne-Daniel Berard, author of The Realm of Blessing
"In Nothing More to Lose, Carolyn Martin has read and written my soul." -Therese Kolbert Dieringer
"Dieringer's voice comes through each of Martin's poems showing how kindness and cruelty co-exist in us all, and how true strength and resilience cannot be extinguished. Most importantly, kindness wins." -Kathleen Cassen Mickelson, cofounder of Gyroscope Review
More details
Language
English
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Dimensions
Height: 216 mm
Width: 140 mm
Thickness: 4 mm
Weight
92 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-948461-78-8 (9781948461788)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
From Roman Catholic Sister of Mercy and English teacher in New Jersey to international management trainer; from author of business books to poetry collections; from work addict to devotee of the Spanish proverb, "It is beautiful to do nothing and rest afterwards," Carolyn Martin is blissfully retired--and resting--in Clackamas, Oregon. A lover of gardening and snorkeling, feral cats and backyard birds, Martin embraces poetry as her way of interacting with the world¬¬--in images, rhythms, sounds, and intensities of language. That is why she's settled into the joyful task of translating experience into as few words as possible.Her aesthetic is found in Galway Kinnell's statement, "To me, poetry is somebody standing up...and saying, with as little concealment as possible, what it is for him or her to be on earth at this moment." With little concealment, her poems grapple with this challenge. Martin's poems have appeared in more than 200 publications throughout North America, Australia, and the UK. The Poetry Box released her second collection, The Way a Woman Knows, in 2015; a chapbook, Nothing More to Lose, in 2020; and her fifth collection, The Catalog of Small Contentments, in 2021. For more see: www.carolynmartinpoet.com.