Cauterized - Paperback

by Laura Apol (Author)

Cauterize: to burn or freeze the flesh around a wound to stop heavy bleeding. In her sixth full-length collection, award-winning poet Laura Apol returns to themes of loss that are, at least partly, cauterized: her struggles with a conservative religious upbringing, her mother's illness and death, children growing up and leaving home, losing her adult daughter to suicide, a worldwide pandemic, the casualties of age. With startling honesty, empathy, and lyrical precision, Apol offers insight into the ways some wounds need cautery to begin to heal. This is a book that will resonate with anyone who has grappled with the complexities of grief, forgiveness, resilience, and healing across time.

Author Biography

For more than twenty years, Laura Apol has conducted workshops for writers of all skill levels in local, national, and international contexts. She is the author of several collections of poetry, including Nothing but the Blood, winner of the 2019 Oklahoma Book Award for poetry and the 2019 silver medal for the Independent Publisher Book Award for poetry, and A Fine Yellow Dust, winner of the 2022 Midwest Book Award for Poetry. From 2019-2021, Apol served as the poet laureate for the Lansing area in mid-Michigan.