DESCRIPTION

In Crazing Thompson is writing about dementia, loss (and rediscovery) of the self, drought, and environmental collapse.

“My body and the earth’s body are one,” as she has said elsewhere. These two threads – her “crazing” skin and mind, and the similarly delaminating body of earth – interweave in this book. There is deep grief, elegy for what is leaving, but also joy – even one’s own mental cracks and the drought-stricken earth are transformed by “laughter’s fire.”

“Who are you and what do you love?” is the question of the book, and the answer, despite loss of memory and the earth’s “seepage toward empty,” is “this, this, this, this …”

She hopes this book will connect with those who are dealing with dementia, those in grief about aging, those in despair over the future of our planet.

REVIEWS

"Ruth Thompson responds with extraordinary grace and playfulness to the scattering of her mental and physical abilities in old age, the “crazing” of the glaze that gives the vessel its character, the cracks in the body’s shell from which the spirit emerges like a baby chick. She mourns not for herself but for lost tree species, droughts, and future generations who may “die thirsty, telling stories of our green shade.” Her acceptance of her personal body’s limitations shows us a humbler, more sustainable way to inhabit the body of Mother Earth."

— Jendi Reiter, author of Bullies in Love

"If you are beyond midlife or love someone who is, Thompson’s third volume of poetry is a gift of nurture. Read these poems several times over; between lines compelling within themselves emerges a sense of inevitability we tend to turn away from. This book is a mirror reflecting beauty in aging, changing, becoming other-than-we-were. These thirty-five poems are a bouquet of wisdom."

Story Circle Network Book Reviews July 8th, 2015

"[…] Sings with beauty, loss, and hope. Her poems boom and soar, full of movement and sensory experience caught in gorgeous, chewable language.

Sandra Hunter, Author, Losing Touch

These poems vibrate on the page with essential, powerful life-force, in language as playful and gorgeously-lit as it is sharply wise. Thompson’s work offers multiple intelligences we direly need in our mortal, vulnerable passage through this beautiful and difficult world, “our great bright barge of stone and light.

Jessamyn Smyth, Author, Kitsu