Childhood

Poems by Emily R. Grosholz, with Drawings by Lucy Vines

In this gorgeous, heartwarming collection about childbirth and adopting, children and parents, the poems by accomplished poet Emily R. Grosholz interact with color drawings by gifted Parisian artist Lucy Vines.

A fixed percentage from the sale of this book will go to an international organization that works to protect and encourage children worldwide, by providing food and water, medical attention, shelter from violence, and education; this children's humanitarian organization has saved more lives than any other.[1]

What Others Say About Childhood

These eloquent, edgy poems write of youth and parenting in powerful ways. They also go well beyond that, in addressing childhood as revelation: not just the temporal state we all go through, but the crisis of wonder our own children produce in us. Any reader who picks up this book can draw closer to that wonder and share in it again through this lyrical, moving work.

—Eavan Boland
Professor of English, Stanford University and Member, Irish Academy of Letters

Emily Grosholz is a singular presence in American letters—a poet-philosopher whose brilliant verse on science, mathematics and ideas has been justly praised. But my favorite Grosholz work has always been her tender and arresting poems on motherhood and children. It is a joy to see these luminous and loving poems gathered into one richly expressive volume.

—Dana Gioia
Past Director, National Endowment for the Arts

Childhood by Emily Grosholz reminds me of how delightful, invigorating, and at the same time humbling my experience of parenthood was. These poems lend us wings to fly from Kilimanjaro to Paris and on to the Caribbean with our children, and they make differences of physical size disappear by magnifying molecules and compactifying the universe. They take us on a time machine ride that starts in primordial times, making stops in the era of the dinosaurs, then in the Paleolithic period of Altamira, finally bringing us back through millennia to the present. They freeze time and space, paradoxically melting everything to a singular point where I remember each of my children and myself cuddled together, or looking into each others' eyes, or trying to fix catastrophes, sometimes by weeping. Need I mention that the singular point is also known as the future, hope or love? One reason why so many Japanese and American people made the commitment to "morally adopt" thousands of children orphaned by the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima might have been because they knew these truths, and felt the sentiments that Childhood has so beautifully captured.

—Tadatoshi Akiba
Past President, Mayors for Peace and Past Mayor, Hiroshima

The Shape of Desire

Tracing an airplane's pale trajectory,
You always point, and finish, "Airplane gone."
Waking from dreams about your babysitter's
Dark-eyed, clever daughter, you conclude,
"Lulu gone," and hurry to the door's
Long windowpane to see her reappear
Freshly composed from memory and clouds.
Now you can say the shape of your desire.

Now you believe that each sidereal item
Carries a left-hand banner to describe
Through curl and dissipation how it was,
That every friend is summoned by a name,
Even in parting. You are wrong, and right
About the frail parabolas of love.

Details and Ordering

Publication Date: October 15, 2014
Format: Softcover, 5½" x 8½"
ISBN: 978-1-936628-27-8
Price: $15.00

About the Author and Illustrator

Emily Grosholz grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia, and has taught philosophy at the Pennsylvania State University for thirty-five years, with sojourns in France, England, Germany, the Netherlands, Israel, Finland, Costa Rica, Russia, Greece, Spain and Italy. She and her husband Robert R. Edwards (medievalist, rugbyman, and soccer coach) raised four children in State College, Pennsylvania, surrounded by small farms and green hills on one side and the town and university on the other. She is an advisory editor for The Hudson Review, and this is her seventh book of poetry.

Lucy Vines was born in 1929 in Hartford, Connecticut. She was raised in New York City, then came to France during the McCarthy era and has lived in Paris ever since, in a milieu of writers and painters. She is married and has one child. The Morat Foundation in Freiburg, Germany, the École des Beaux-Arts in Nîmes, France, and the Maison de l'Amérique Latine in Paris have held retrospective shows devoted to her work. Her works are untitled.



Our sales have already gone to support the welfare of children worldwide with donations to UNICEF. Please click on the images above to read more.