Still Life, Broken and Repaired: Poems

By Tracy Rittmueller and Christine Klocek-Lim

Written between 2007 and 2022, this collection of lyrical poems explores the the impact of a spouse's dementia on a loving relationship. These are poems in search of a good life, which, the author believes, must be available to us even in the midst of profound suffering.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lyricality
• Release date: Jan 23, 2023
• ISBN: 9780965592277

Tracy Rittmueller

Tracy Rittmueller is a crafter of poems, essays and stories, and the founding director of Lyricality, a Central Minnesota grass roots organization fostering the art of empathy through poetry and story. As a producer of cultural events and a teaching artist, she facilitates trauma-sensitive awareness in order to be deliberately inclusive, respectful of individual personhood, and increasingly aware of the ways language and authority are used within human relationships to give and take power.

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praise for

still life, broken

and

repaired

Tracy Rittmueller immerses us in a forest of imagery, encouraging us to consider the small details of nature as well as its grandeur, and illuminating the ferocity and complexity of the pursuit of grace and harmony.

—Kris Bigalk, author of Enough, (NYC Books, 2018)

Tracy Rittmueller's lyrical poems inhabit a many-roomed mansion of emotions. There are small-windowed rooms filled with grief and loss, other rooms filled with beauty and wonder, and still others that are bright with a soothing, healing light. You'll enjoy a stroll through this mansion of poetry, and as you do, you'll experience what it is to be truly human.

—Bill Meissner, author of five books of poetry and 2 novels, including Summer of Rain, Summer of Fire

Still Life Broken and Repaired by Tracy Rittmueller is a moving exploration of the pain dementia causes as it burrows into a loving relationship. In these arresting poems, the speaker grapples with her partner’s dementia and its ensuing uncertainties and injustices—the loss of work, of memory, of romantic connection, and of a dreamed-of future. Rittmueller’s honest and vulnerable poems explore the gray ravages of sadness, but they also burst with colorful dragonflies, wild lupine, deep forests, and days spent harvesting carrots. Nature offers a much-needed diversion from ongoing loss, and it provides reminders that love came first, and love remains. In the poem Learning Kintsugi (the Japanese art of repairing breaks in pottery with gold), Rittmueller writes, because the art / of golden repair is the art of refusing / to hide the beautiful strength of our damage (39). Quiet despair commingled with a desire for hope carves a path through grief in this powerful, must-read collection.

—Paige Riehl, author of Suspension (Terrapin Books, 2018)

Still Life, Broken and Repaired is a work that starts in the key of grief and plays — sometimes desperately, sometimes joyously — until it modulates into the sound of hope.

—Dennis Vogen, author of the graphic novel series Brushfire

In Still Life, Broken and Repaired, Tracy Rittmueller explores the blemished catalogue of blossoming contentments