Hospice catalogs a decade in the poet’s life marked by becoming a mother while supporting a terminally ill parent, reckoning with the intimate work of caregiving. Formal explorations grapple with the twinned dynamics of mothering and motherlessness. Throughout the collection, Molly Akin considers how we trace our origins and inheritance within the imperfections of memory. Hospice employs precise and deliberate syntax to examine universally human and deeply personal themes.
“With lightness and depth, this collection unravels the sacred contradictions that sustain us, the ones embedded in being alive, of mothering, of losing and loving, again and again.” –Tatiana Johnson-Boria, author of Nocturne in Joy
“In these poems, the reader sojourns across a defamiliarized world, acutely described with a Dickinsonian economy and cataloged, freshly, by Akin’s fine-toothed aesthetic.” – Jane Huffman, author of Public Abstract and Dilemma
“In a lean but hard-hitting, visceral verse, Akin ardently depicts what it is like dealing with the loss of a mother, void and haunting memory. A strong, memorable debut collection!” – Jose Hernandez Diaz, Bad Mexican, Bad American; The Lighthouse Tattoo; The Parachutist; Portrait of the Artist as a Brown Man
