Slow Wreckage - by Barbara Crooker (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

The poems in this collection consider the "slow wreckage" that comes with advancing years. As well as considering the travails of an aging individual, Barbara Crooker uses a wider lens to examine the damages inflicted by society and its failings. And through it all, or despite it all, Crooker finds beauty and hope in the physical world. In Slow Wreckage, she writes with candor, irony, and ultimately, love.

Review Quotes

Barbara Crooker's previous poetry collections have gained her a wide readership with superbly crafted poems celebrating the daily joys of what she terms an ordinary life, but she has always written, too, about loss. In this, her tenth book, she considers aging, or, as her title brilliantly puts it, the "Slow Wreckage" time inflicts upon us all. In many of these poems, Crooker widens her focus to include the failures of our society, damages inflicted upon us and upon our Earth as a result of our blindness or our country's short-sighted policies. Addressing Walt Whitman, she asks: "It's the twenty-first century, in America. Can you still hear us singing?" Barbara Crooker wants us all to keep singing in the wreckage. The song she offers is one I hope will be with us for years to come.

Marjorie Stelmach, author of Walking the Mist

Though on the surface, Slow Wreckage might seem to be about aging and loss, Crooker brings us back again and again to the physical pleasures of being alive, in spite of surgeries and intense pain, in spite of those "delicious burdens" we must carry each day...Her expansive, honest, and clear-eyed poems are exactly the medicine we need to "love in these dangerous times."

-James Crews, author of Unlocking the Heart: Writing for Mindfulness, Creativity, and Self-Compassion

For years I have been an admirer of Barbara Crooker's poems, her voice and intelligence, its truth and grounded vision offering such specific attention to the world. Slow Wreckage raises her poetic project to yet higher ground, integrating irony, wit, humor, and a metaphysical cast into the difficulties we all come to in age-the scope and range of this collection is remarkable. These poems take up loss as well as love, yet resonate ultimately with praise and thanks, singing authentically as all the best poetry does.

-Christopher Buckley, author of One Sky to the Next

Once again Barbara Crooker has knocked it out of the park in her poetry collection aptly titled Slow Wreckage as she looks back at her life through the lens of a seventy-something woman...Slow Wreckage is about aging, but it is more than that. It is about appreciating the life we had and still have.

--Sharon Waller Knutson, StoryTeller Review

Crooker has never been stronger both in range of subject and variety of technique...While the aging process is her main concern, she weaves into the whole a lifetime of experiences borne of a deeply spiritual worldview. I was impressed by Crooker's social commentary, concerns about climate change, acute sorties into historical mistakes made to specific people groups. It is as if Slow Wreckage is a summation of fragments collected, organized, and set down, all the pieces in their proper place, a tapestry hung on the living room walls of her readers.

-Michael Escoubas, Quill & Parchment

Slow Wreckage is an eloquent collection of poems that plumb the pangs and pleasures of an alert and engaged life, renders wisdom in the face of mortality.

-Mindy Kronenberg, Mom Egg Review

Crooker's work is a feast for the senses; she describes nature in such a luminous detail that the physical becomes spiritual..

-Janet McCann, Innisfree Poetry Journal

"Barbara Crooker's new poetry collection is a journey through loss that reveals the world's beauty,"

-The Christian Century