SHERYL ST. GERMAIN's poetry books include Making Bread at Midnight, How Heavy the Breath of God, The Journals of Scheherazade, and Let it Be a Dark Roux: New and Selected Poems. She has written two memoirs, Swamp Songs: the Making of an Unruly Woman, and Navigating Disaster: Sixteen Essays of Love and a Poem of Despair. She co-edited, with Margaret Whitford, Between Song and Story: Essays for the Twenty-First Century, and with Sarah Shotland Words Without Walls: Writers on Violence, Addiction and Incarceration. She directs the MFA program in Creative Writing at Chatham University and is co-founder of the Words Without Walls program. She lives in Pittsburgh, PA.
A potent, straightforward collection of poems that makes vivid the
gritty truth of addiction, grief, and survival. http:
//www.americanmicroreviews.com/the-small-door-of-your-death-by-sheryl-st-germain--Edward
A. Dougherty "American Microreviews and Interviews" (9/1/2018
12:00:00 AM)
"The Small Door of Your Death," is the latest collection by local
poet and New Orleans native Sheryl St. Germain. St. Germain, an
award- winning writer and director of the Masters of Fine Arts
writing program at Chatham University, uses the book's 89 pages as
a way of coming to terms with the December 2014 overdose death of
her only son, Gray St. Germain Gideon. The writing here lingers,
full of beauty and pain. And as with so much of St. Germain's work,
it's the precise language and strong voice that make it soar.
https:
//pittsburghquarterly.com/between-the-issues/item/1685-sheryl-st-germain-muses-on-her-son-s-overdose-in-the-small-door-of-your-death.html--Fred
Shaw "Pittsburgh Quarterly" (5/1/2018 12:00:00 AM)
Writers of elegy are compelled to remember their dead, even when
they can't forget them. Therefore, the art's best practitioners
offset despair with a sense of affirmation. They must also
articulate universal experience through personal suffering and
master aesthetic distance while conveying emotional intensity. Such
balances, always hard to strike, are that much more difficult when
the poet is a parent mourning the loss of a child. Only the bravest
bard risks that charge--and the relentless focus Sheryl St. Germain
invests in The Small Door of Your Death proves she's very brave
indeed. With unwavering restraint, she records and deconstructs her
son Gray's losing battle to heroin using an original, disciplined
language to express maternal anxiety. The remarkable control with
which she handles her subject does not disguise or dampen moments
of searing pain. On every page of St. Germain's fifth book of
poems, she manifests what Adrienne Rich once called "wild patience.
https:
//brooklynrail.org/2018/04/books/Sheryl-St-Germains-The-Small-Door-of-Your-Death--Tony
Leuzzi "Brooklyn Rail" (4/1/2018 12:00:00 AM)
Alcoholism and drug addiction equal death. They follow in that
order in this stunning heartbreaking fierce book of grief. No one
should lose a son but if he dies after a light filled life it is
tragic -- if he dies after a life of formative pain and struggle,
it's disaster and tragedy. St. Germain provides a platform for the
bitter headwind of a mother's grief -- of perseverance and lost
reckonings. There's no sea change for addiction. There's only
drowning. No poetic policies can set that right, but that this book
could have been written at all means that somewhere a chorus of
Angels is spurring the poet on -- for no earthly ability could make
her endure page after page of brutal tectonics. This book is epic
in shaping a life and death where the coalition of drugs curse and
ruin life's every opportunity. This is penetrating mesmerizing
writing. A star shines through the ruin and rubble -- evidence that
this boy's spirit lives through his mother's brave hand.--Grace
Cavalieri "The Washington Independent Review of Books" (1/1/2018
12:00:00 AM)
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