April 2022
Pine Row Press
REVIEWS
Of all the volumes mothers have written about their children and their experiences of motherhood, Marie Gauthier, with Leave No Wake, proves it is yet possible to share new thought and new creativity about this profound and universal experience[.]
—Carole Mertz, MER
With grace and honesty, Marie Gauthier explores complex themes of grief and motherhood in her new poetry book, Leave No Wake. …Her poetry dares to look unflinchingly at all sides of these deeply painful issues, but without veering into the grotesque or sentimental.
—Nicole Braden-Johnson, Greenfield Recorder
ADVANCE PRAISE
In Marie Gauthier’s long-awaited first collection, we are greeted by lyric intimacies, wistful weather, stunning turns of phrase, and the deep comfort of domestic scenes. With its earthy autumnal edge, Leave No Wake offers a meditation on family, illness, and loss, and how the scale of celebrating subtle moments and life’s “small economies” almost always shifts toward grief. Gauthier’s deft hand sketches portraits of the rhythm inherent in rural landscapes, where “snow falls // in longhand” even among “a whole trove / of darkness and dreads-to-be,” as the book’s smooth movement through inspired waters reminds us that life’s inevitable fade seems “a Polaroid in reverse.” Leave No Wake is the debut of a true talent.
—Jennifer Militello, author of The Pact
In Leave No Wake, the crow hovers. Marie Gauthier’s poems are an “incantation against forgetting,” bitter and sweet like an unripe persimmon, and as beautiful as a pearl. They map family memories and resurrect ghosts. Poems, where “old griefs shudder and fall,” and “the living move in long-winded waves.” Poems that uncover what shatters and sustains life with remarkable precision.
—Ines P. Rivera Prosdocimi, author of Love Letter to an Afterlife
In Leave No Wake, Marie Gauthier pens an incredible guide that allows one to truly embrace the fullness of what it means to be a human, being. In this magnificently crafted collection, each poem is a staunch meditation of how “the living move in long-winded waves” while trying to “evade calamity” rather than coming to terms with “life’s inevitable attrition.” It is written with the vibrations of a voice that knows quite well what lies in the undertow of even the smallest setbacks. At a time when we need it the most, this is a book of significant reverberations and revelations on how to navigate the waters of grief and loss, no matter how small the wake.
—Enzo Silon Surin, Poet, Publisher, Social Advocate, and Award-winning author of When My Body Was A Clinched Fist
Marie Gauthier 