All These Things Were Real

"How do you dress for a front/row seat at the suffering of another?" Michelle Reale's intimate poems answer this question with bold precision, witnessing the alcoholic with a starkness that recalls Fitzgerald's portrayal of his own crack-up. Reale's speaker meets "the wolf at the door," tosses him some raw meat, and dares him to dance the tarantella until he drops. -- Jessie Janeshek All These Things Were Real: Poems of Delirium Tremens, is a sonorous lament on the worst unholy nightmares - bringing the urgent intimacy of a mother's love for a sick and wayward child bravely into the public arena. She reveals the frailties of being alive, of loving and losing, rawly exposing anguish with a candid eloquence. -- Cynthia Atkins Reale's collection of poems takes readers on a lyric journey into the inexplicable parts of illness and a mother's fierce love. These poems make sense of the senseless, the ways that illness fractures our self and relationships, and turns who we thought we were into slivers of broken mirror that we walk across with bare feet. The poems work to make us whole again. -- Sandra L. Faulkner