Overview

Two Years and Two Months is a contemplation of the complex and many-stranded love the author shares with her mother. The poems celebrate their living together in the last two years and two months of her mother's life, as she turns 100, and as they are sabotaged by a world pandemic, to then find themselves redeemed by a sharing of memories, a love for the natural world and literature. As they deal with the nightly news of a strange new world, and the daily chores of kitchen and laundry, they spend their afternoons reading aloud new or favorite books from Swann's Way to Jane Eyre, from Robinson Crusoe to Circe. The poems soon deal with the losses and confusion that come with the mother's stroke in the final months, as mother and daughter eke out unexpected pathways of love and meaning through the words of Milton, Lucille Clifton, Kay Ryan and others. As her mother's life is ending, Reed's life as a poet begins.

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As a minister with a focus on social justice issues, Chris Reed worked with the poetry and music of worship, ceremony, prayers, sermons, eulogies and spiritual writings, including developing and writing a guide for interfaith visits, Neighboring Faiths, Beacon Press. She served the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Princeton for 22 years and as UU Chaplain at Princeton University for ten years. Given retirement, her aging mother, the covid pandemic and a life-long love of literature, she turned to the reading and writing poetry to find meaning amid loss and confusion, and to celebrate our moments and actions that are life-affirming.

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