cauterized
Apol, L. (2024). Cauterized East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press
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.
Finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award.
Second finalist for the Poetry Society of Virginia North American Poetry Book Award.
As I read the poems in Laura Apol’s newest collection, Cauterized, I feel them existing inside me. This is what I cherish as a reader—to have a poet who skillfully leads me on a journey with her stunning imagery of monarchs, cats, dogs, and the encompassing natural world. Apol weaves beautiful narratives of family, grief, relationships, and the rawness of life always with empathy, always while embracing the lifeblood of existence…. The brilliance of this work changed me in the best ways, both as a poet and person.
—Kelli Russell Agodon, author of Dialogues with Rising Tides
The spirits that hover over and through these poems become entirely incarnate at the poet’s beckoning. The shades, of course, come freighted with questions. There are good ghosts, umbrae of their former or imagined lives with which the poet seems eager to reconnect. Accordingly, the work traffics in the essential rather than accessory dynamics of love and grief, faith and its failings—a brave endeavor, to bring such things to light.
—Thomas Lynch, author of Bone Rosary: New and Selected Poems
Laura Apol’s Cauterized is a lovely collection of poetry. Rich imagery sets the stage through which the emotional reveal packs its punch. Poems of grief and loss, of the victories and failures within relationships both familial and romantic, of the vicissitudes of being alive in this wondrously tangled existence remind us all to pay close attention, to learn the songs of nature, and to fully inhabit the possible. Brava.
—Pia Täavila-Borsheim, author of Above the Birch Line
In Cauterized, Laura Apol brings us poems that are both intimate and honest; she gives us deeply beautiful poems filled with sorrow and wonder.
—Faith Shearin, author of Lost Language
Laura Apol's latest poetry collection, Cauterized, is moving and beautiful, even in its sadness. Apol locates longing so viscerally: the upturned palms, scars “brined as leather,” “a daughter’s name/ brimstone on my tongue,” “shampoo and clothes . . ./ the scent of her,” “such hunger, so little bread.” Yet the poems persist in finding ways to soften grief so that it can be carried: the daughter is not just a meteor flaming out but a voice saved in amber; the mother asks the doe “what to take over, crossing; /what to leave behind.” And the brave poems “Backbeat” and “One Magnolia” acknowledge that such deep grieving—in blood and bone—can be salved because, as the final poem observes, "everything rises, however buried.” Reviewed in Canada for Amazon on January 27, 2025.
—Susan Braley, author of Tilling the Darkness
