"Long before the Pandemic locked us all into our homes, my personal period of isolation began with my 2017 diagnosis of Acute Myleoid Leukemia, a particularly deadly and fast acting cancer," writes Olive L. Sullivan.
The resulting collection of poetry paints a picture of loss, but also of survival in the face of loss. Skiving "through layers of / loss and sorrow, honing in on what matters," this book shows us how one woman faces her own impending death, the loss of her husband and her father, and comes out on the other side, very much alive, "only truth remaining."
Review :
Coping with a Job-worthy siege of affliction and loss, Olive L. Sullivan leans deep upon poetry's age-old capacities to invoke, petition, mourn, chant, console, purge, heal, and celebrate. In this skillfully and subtly woven collection, she moves through life's challenging transformations-paying close attention to the visitations and portents of dreams as well as the signs and wonders of the natural world-to arrive at the place
where there's "only truth remaining." And who does not need that?
― Jeanne Marie Beaumont
What we surrender, what we crave, what we pray is more than a mirage, what we fear is only a chimera-these are Olive Sullivan's obsessions. In Skiving Down the Bones, Sullivan anatomizes loss in a marvelous range of voices. Her speakers are the priestess, the widow, the cancer patient, the uncaged soul reaching for Dickinson's white heat. Like "notes falling / into a minor chord," Sullivan's lines dive and tremble. Sister to St. Ursula, Sullivan "knows / what we already know. / It's just that she is willing / to say it out loud / and be pierced for it."
― Joshua Davis, author of Reversal Spells in Blue and Black (Seven Kitchens Press, 2022)
