Slamming Open the Door
"Readers will have to step outside of a familiar, comforting tradition of poetic grief while reading this book....To read [Slamming Open the Door] is to stand onstage with a writer who finds herself in the middle of a story in which she has been reluctantly cast."—The New York Times Book Review"I really love the poems we're about to hear. They're beautifully written. But some of them really hurt. They're about the worst thing that can happen to a mother, the murder of her child."—Terry Gross, Host ofFresh Air"Written with skill in tight, spare lines without sentimentality or melodrama, Bonanno launches readers through the experience, one that evokes a universal terror...A stunning first book."—Library Journal“When Emily Dickinson wrote the line 'After great pain, a formal feeling comes' I think she was referring to poems—and the occasions that make them impossibleto notwrite—like these. Spare, unflinching, and powerful, the poems inSlamming Open the Doormove me to the bone. How does one say I love this book, which I wish never had to be written? Only one way: I love this book. I wish it did not have to be written.”—Thomas Lux