Switchgrass: Poems About Marriage, Illness, and the Healing Power of Love and Nature

By Marie Kane

Marie Kane’s fourth book of poetry, Switchgrass, is certainly about her and her husband’s physical disabilities, but it is much more. It’s about their shared journey powered by courage and hope. While carefully observing the life cycle of wild, year-round switchgrass, Kane allows us to witness this couple’s vulnerabilities, pain, and challenges. These she expertly weaves together with their love for each other and their strong marriage into something as enduring as switchgrass, whose “Deep roots subdue flood, / control washout / survive the inevitable.” Kane suffuses her book’s engaging narrative with the enchanting and vital role elements of nature, especially water, play in their lives, often proffering them a lifeline. Adding luscious color (her husband is an artist) and with a steady buoyancy, Kane elegantly claims her life story, their love story as the seasons of switchgrass unfold—and as she and her husband come to appreciate that “the season’s shortened / dusk enables more time for moonlight / and stars to share the sky.”
—Wendy Fulton Steginsky, author of Let This Be Enough

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Apr 23, 2023
• ISBN: 9781728377667

Marie Kane

Marie Kane grew up in Coral Gables, Florida and Dunmore, Pennsylvania—two very different climates. Her parents divorced when she was nine and she, her mom, and younger brother moved from Florida to PA to live with her grandparents. That first snow she experienced was a marvel, as was the spring, summer, and glorious autumn. She credits her love of nature and the change of seasons to that move. Her love of the written word began when her mom, Jean Reddington, taught her how to read before 1st grade. This fascination with words and reading continued in all of her elementary and middle school years until high school, where her English teacher, Paul Bradican, taught a poetry unit where he encouraged her to write poetry. “You’re good at it,” he said. “Keep writing!” She did. She graduated from Bloomsburg University with a BS in English Secondary Education, then earned a MA in English Education with a concentration in Creative Writing at Arcadia University. She taught grades 10, 11, and 12 English and Creative Writing for twenty-eight years in Central Bucks School District (PA), retiring in 2007. Kane is honored to be named the 2006 Bucks County (PA) Poet Laureate. She was diagnosed with MS in 1991, and her husband with Amyloidosis in 2015. Marie Kane lives in Yardley, PA, with her husband, Stephen Millner, a photographer, painter, and mixed media and assemblage artist, and their rescue cats Casey Jones and Emma Peel. See more at www.mariekanepoetry.com.

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