Stroke, Stroke is about experiencing a strokethe symptoms, challenges, and perplexities before, during, and after having a stroke, and the often long recovery afterward. Told with a sense of wonder and often humor, Stroke, Stroke finds the humor, beauty, and acceptance in a sudden betrayal of the body.
About the Author :
MARCELLA REMUND is originally from Omaha, Nebraska, transplanted to South Dakota. Her work has appeared in The Briar Cliff Review, Jabberwock, Poetry Ireland Review, Pasque Petals, Banyan Review, Live Encounters, Sheila-Na-Gig, Quartet, and other journals and anthologies. Also from the author: The Sea is My Ugly Twin, The Book of Crooked Prayer, and Hysterian. She lives in a small town on the Missouri River, in a multi-species household. Find more information at www.marcellaremund.com
Review :
The poems in Marcella Remund's latest collection Stroke, Stroke speak to us from a country not many of us have visited. It is rare to find someone who can articulate darkness. The kind of pitch black where you can't see your hands in front of you. Remund is one of those people. Informed by bravado and bravery, there is no false sentimentality in this collection. To read these poems is to "know yourself part stranger" and to recognize that frailty and resistance are mirror images of each other.
-Eve Joseph, author of Quarrels, The Startled Heart, and The Signature of Things (thalamic ischemic stroke, 2013)
This isn't a self-help book about stroke recovery, but something better, and more important. With pain, fear, frustration, humor, and ultimately, eloquence, love, and hope, Marcella
Remund brings us into the mind of a stroke victim, lets us see it-with wonderful, specific language, vivid words, lustrous imagination and deep-feeling emotion. She writes about what it means to "be held captive in a body that no longer recognizes your authority." She raises tough questions, philosophical questions, but then shows us the courage, hard work, and self-understanding that occur in rebuilding and re-learning. Yes, medicine and science know more now than they ever have about how our brains work, about what goes wrong, about the long trip back from trauma, but we still need poets to explain how those things feel, and Remund does it not just very well, but beautifully well.
-Dana Yost, author of Free-Fall, Grace, and In Your Head (ischemic stroke, 2019)
