Muscle Memories of Love and Disaster

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by Tim Mayo

Muscle Memories of Love and Disaster explores the arc of a life shaped by loss and renewed by love. The poems intertwine to explore grief from the loss of loved ones (a lover, a daughter and close friends), early memories of growing up in an immigrant foster home, later memories of working in a mental hospital, the poet's own recovery from addiction, the emotional and spiritual impact of a near death and life-changing accident with its lasting, crippling effects, and an acceptance of a life nearing its own chronological end. Although there is a darkness in these poems, they belie the empathy and subtle humor in the poems and the joy of finding love in later life after so much loss.

Praise for Muscle Memories of Love and Disaster:

If you open this book in the bookstore, open it to "At the Chemo Clinic" –– a powerful elegy that refuses to go quietly as a father accompanies his daughter to the chemo ward, and likens it to a kind of gas station, where nurses "attach the clear plastic hose to her chest and start the pump." In his poem "Self-portrait with Trache," Mayo writes "Grief is a black parrot in my throat." But there is more than grief in these poems. They tell us how a life is carried—stubbornly, tenderly—in the body––as the lyric moment glides from still-life landscapes and winter woods to hospital rooms, rehab corridors, and how life can still be remade with meaning via the music and clarity of poetry. An insistence on attentiveness lives fiercely in these compelling poems.  —  Ilya Kaminsky, author of Dancing in Odessa and Deaf Republic

“What we want/is to reenvision the wilting/flowers perking back/to full bloom, luminous/and still in their vase,” Tim Mayo writes in his remarkable third collection, Muscle Memories of Love and Other Disasters. Mayo’s poems reenvision his history through precise images and startling metaphors—his past a “black wolf.” He asks: “What do you do for this wolf/you have fed since birth/” and responds, “throw it a bone.” Whether he’s telling us about his poetry mentors, his father and mother, his stepfather, his daughter, the patients he has worked with at the hospital, or his friends, his lyrical narratives always wind their way to the truth of our mortal being. Muscle Memories of Love and Other Disasters is a book of elegies that speaks with compassion and urgency of the pain and beauty of loving those who pass from our lives all too quickly.  — Jeff Friedman, author of Ashes in Paradise and Floating Tales

Tim Mayo’s Muscle Memories of Love and Disaster arise from the charged intersection of body, history, and moral attention. These poems refuse consolation, yet they are never inert: a blue heron advances with “leggy defiance,” grief “hardens… but never leaves the body,” and war becomes a sound for which “there is no word small enough to fit / inside the human mouth.” Moving through illness, war, fractured family, and witness, Mayo’s lines test what it means to remain sentient—to keep seeing—when meaning splinters. This is a poetry of fierce perception, where survival itself becomes an ethical act.  — Dzvinia Orlowsky, author of Those Absences Now Closest and Bad Harvest

ISBN: 978-1-961451-15-5