In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Introduction We are proud to present the first anthology ever of poems by widows: women old and young, legally married or not, straight or gay, whose partners or spouses have died. The title of this book is only partly ironic: few songs, stories, or legends show us how to behave and survive as contemporary widows, our status often diminished as single women in a coupled society. How do you live with the absence of a love that has filled your life, the loss of the identity that being needed gave you? How do you bear it? Becoming a widow is likely to be the most painfully overwhelming change that most women ever face. Are there any choices? Is there a way to do it right? How can we do it at all? These poems and essays express the ways that more than eighty women of our time have mourned, despaired, remembered, struggled, and perhaps reached places of peace or renewal. Many of these works are beautiful, but some, though eloquent, are not pretty. We chose them because we felt that they told the truth from and about the writer’s heart, either directly or allusively, and because they told that truth in a way that felt like poetry. Although the prose pieces included here are not formatted as poems, we found them to be as transformative as poetry in their imagery, rhythm and feeling. Some notable writers have published memoirs or poems about their first year or two of widowhood, but no collection has ever covered such a wide range of widows’ experiences. This book is by and for widows, and also for our families and other people who want to understand us, who may be even more confused than we are about how being a widow feels and what has happened to our lives. While we chose to limit the contributors to women who had lost husbands and lovers, we hope that men whose partners have died will also find their feelings and some of their situations here. The Widows’ Handbook includes writing about mourning and its rituals, other people’s responses to grieving widows, coping strategies and spiritual resources that help some of us, supportive people in our lives (or the lack of them),andhow lifegoesforward:isolation,work,friends,dating,andsometimes even a new love or focus. It celebrates the resources that we draw on to attend xix to work, children, grandchildren, home, garden and, especially, to ourselves, once the first flurry of tasks is over and shock has turned to the realization that nothing will ever be the same. Only poetry can speak such difficult truths and convey feelings in images that incite readers to empathize so intensely. There is no psychobabble here, no “stages of grief,” no preaching, no easy answers; no assumption that we are all alike or have the same beliefs, and no hypocrisy. Our contributors come from, and live, all over the United States—and one in England. Some have written all their lives, some are published widely, some have won major prizes for poetry. Others started writing more recently, and for some, this is their first publication. The anthology grew out of our own connection : widowed college classmates reading each other’s poems and realizing we had the elements of a book. As we made our selections from among nearly five hundred submissions and from poems that spoke to us in published collections, our conversations—with each other and with many of the authors who sent us their work—generated a sense of the solidarity, encouragement, and sustenance that helps all of us carry our grief and live our new lives in spite of our partners’ irrevocable absence. Many of the women whose work you are about to read told us they wished they had had a book like this to give them a few clues when they first became widows. Among the hundreds of different moods reflected here, you may find a match for your own as it fluctuates by the minute, the hour, the year. We hope you may find, somewhere in this collection, the small but real comfort of realizing that others have endured the same screaming pain and numbing solitude as you did. If you do not, these poems and essays may help you find the words you need to tell your own varieties of truth. Jacqueline Lapidus & Lise Menn xx introduction ...

Share