poetry chapbook – The Poetry Cafe

Lauren Davis in conversation with Laura E. Garrard,
author of Paddling the Sweet Spot Between Life and Death,
Finishing Line Press, 2026

Lauren Davis: Congratulations on the publication of your debut chapbook Paddling the Sweet Spot Between Life and Death (Finishing Line Press, 2026), which the poet Tess Gallagher has called “a true teaching of how to live daily on the shifting edge of our own mortality and that of those we love.” Truly, this is a book that looks impermanence straight on. Can you tell us a little bit about how this book came to be?

Laura E. Garrard: This book is an offspring of a full-length poetry memoir about my initial cancer experience (2020-23) interspersed with nature-focused poems. Poems appear in this book that were not part of the full-length narrative, some of them having been published. A number received repeated comments about how readers related to them, regardless if they had cancer or not. The book begins with the title poem “Paddling the Sweet Spot”—which addresses the fleeting balance of flowing smoothly in life’s waters (“the sweet spot not easy to maintain”) and, I think, the crux of a cancer experience (the balance of being responsible and accepting within the medical realm but also remaining hopeful and true to oneself). From here, the poems proceed according to my emotional progression.

Readers may notice how my thoughts about my own death evolve from shock, to grief, and to acceptance of it as a natural cycle alongside living, playing, and observing. The reader travels with the speaker through this arc of the book and her observations of and participation in nature. Living in the present, sharing grief with one another, and loving, are the speaker’s priorities as a living person who is also dying. We are all simultaneously living and dying, no matter how quickly or slowly death comes. Why fear what is inevitable and spend precious energy on worry? Notice how the barn swallows play as the sun sets, how feeding and nurturing the next generations consume them. Notice how salmon give themselves to death even as they lay and fertilize eggs. Are they focused on birth or death? Most likely birth.

Living in the present, sharing grief with one another, and loving, are the speaker’s priorities as a living person who is also dying.

LD: In your poem “Sailing in the Sunshine,” which explores the “sweet spot of flow called letting go” between will and acceptance, you mention “the peaceful present.” Could you speak to your process of letting go when writing poetry and publishing a book, and how the present moment informed that process?

LEG: Interesting questions. The incentives to submit poems for publication and to present a chapbook are two-fold. I have always desired to be published and share my writing, and I want to provide a voice on behalf of those who face similar challenges. These poems have been instrumental as I learned from indelible moments. I believe others may feel validated.

Launching my work into the public realm is a type of letting go. I had to let go of pride, self-protection, and some of my privacy. I thought long about how I might feel reading these poems to others in person and how others may respond. I tested the waters locally as a featured author for Olympic Peninsula Authors’ Open Mic and determined I could bring these messages without causing myself mental and emotional harm or breaking down while reading them. I found myself resilient and others very receptive. The poems aren’t all tearjerkers, mind you. Some are very uplifting and joyful, strong and irreverent. But I lived through these moments, and they challenged me.

Becoming published is service both to myself (sharing experiences and achieving a dream) and to others (offering my voice and circumstances for a shared identity). Opening myself up to rejection in the submission process requires present-mindedness. The focus needs to be on what comes, not on what doesn’t come. This process of patience isn’t easy, especially with such heartfelt material. Not taking things personally is a form of letting go. This is a lesson I aim to learn.

LD: Where did you find inspiration while compiling these poems? Did you turn to any specific authors or books?

LEG: Inspiration spilled from my cancer experience and the weight of a possible decreased lifespan. Nature and its beings speak to me as well, tell me to become present and turn off churning thoughts. I am living in the moment when I cast my gaze upward, climb into a tree, and seek the sublime, like the joyful antics of dolphins and barn swallows at play. I awoke in the middle of the night composing the poem about the life of a rock, “A Life Worth Remembering.” I wrote the entire poem within my mind before rising from bed and composing it again on the computer. I wrote “The Only Else There Is, the Breath” after crying on my shins on the cold brick, begging healing from God. When the tears dried, I came off the floor and began doing Qi Gong. This was a survival instinct to move past a moment of despair. I have lived these moments, and they seemed important to record.

I have lived these moments, and they seemed important to record.

The poetry muse lives within the poet artist, and I don’t always know how a poem came to me, just that it’s here—a thought, a recognition, a personal revelation. Poems seem to have their own lives that poets capture and hone. Poets don’t create in a vacuum, however. Certainly, my writing groups influenced my work, especially an ongoing workshop with poet Gary Copeland Lilley. This chapbook’s poems are flavored through my mentors from Centrum workshops as well. I have studied with Holly J. Hughes, Tess Gallagher, Alice Derry, Matthew Olzmann, CMarie Fuhrman, Claudia Castro Luna, and others. Their classroom reading selections influenced my work, no doubt, but I haven’t emulated a particular poet or style.

The title, “Homage to My Radiated Hip,” shouts out to Lucille Clifton, whose concise work and hard-hitting subjects I admire. Ultimately, though, I believe these poems are written in my unique voice, an upwelling from personal fear, loss, and relief.

LD: If you could leave your reader with one final thought or word, what would it be?

LEG: I hope that readers reduce their fear in relation to dying and become inspired to stand against ableism, or discrimination against those with illness or disabilities. I did not share my work to receive responses of “how sad” but for potentially “how inspiring.” I’ve already been through these moments. I do not dwell on my death date, an unknown to all of us. I am not interested in sympathy. I am interested in others receiving validation through reading my collection, and to further understanding of the emotions that come with being diagnosed with a terminal or chronic disease and dealing with the stigmas of having cancer.

I did not share my work to receive responses of “how sad” but for potentially “how inspiring.”

When we share openly, we gain strength in our experiences rather than feeling alone in them. I would encourage readers to embrace trust within the unknown as best they can, and let that steer them rather than fear. This is not an aim toward perfection but a returning to, again and again. My wake-up call may serve others. When I reread this collection and my full-length book, I am reminded of the gift of raw uncertainty, the lack of security, which drives the ability to live in the present through heightened observation.

Laura E. Garrard is a CranioSacral Therapist on the Olympic Peninsula. Her poetry has appeared in journals such as Bellevue Literary Review, Amethyst, The Madrona Project, Silver Birch, and TulipTree Review. Her chapbook, Paddling the Sweet Spot Between Life and Death, is available through Finishing Line Press. Winner of the Merit Prize for the 2024 Stories That Need to be Told Contest with TulipTree Publishing, she has also been a finalist for the John and Eileen Allman Prize for Poetry. She writes a series, Poetry That Fits, on Penn Medicine’s OncoLink.org, and she holds a Master’s Degree in Journalism. Learn more at LauraEGarrard.com.

Paddling the Sweet Spot Between Life and Death by Laura E. Garrard
$15.99 Pre-order Price Guarantee until January 30, 2026
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This title will be released on March 27, 2026

Lauren Davis is the author of The Nothing (YesYes Books), Home Beneath the Church (Fernwood Press), When I Drowned, and the chapbooks Each Wild Thing’s Consent, The Missing Ones, and Sivvy. She holds an MFA from the Bennington College Writing Seminars.

Risa Denenberg is the curator at The Poetry Cafe Online.

Tears on the Glass Desert: Speculative Poetry of Holocaust Fallout & Decay by Wesley D. Gray

Review by Don Beukes

As a secret childhood reader of horror—books such as The Rats, by James Herbert or It by Stephen King—and glued to the television watching films like The Birds or Carrie, I knew I was hooked on this genre from an early age.

In Tears on the Glass Desert (Marrowroot Press, 2021), Wesley D. Gray both establishes and earns the subtitle Speculative Poetry of Holocaust, Fallout and Decay. In his own description of the book, Gray invites us to “savor the final three seconds before Doomsday” and to “step through the shattered glass door leading beyond The End and walk through the veil of an apocalyptic dreamscape” in his chapbook of twenty-four poems that “speculate on both the inevitabilities and the impossibilities of nuclear holocaust, the fallout it brings, and the aftermath of its Decay.”

We witness an actual “countdown” over three sequences packed with astonishing and realistic poetic acumen in this cinematic literary journey, taking us to what we might fear the most—the end of this world as we know it.

In the first sequence, “Three to Ignition,” we are immediately plunged into the last three seconds of humanity in the first poem, “23:59:57.” We are lulled into an almost hypnotic state by clever use of melodic near-rhymes such as chime/shine. Gray continues to lull us in the poem “Mushroom State,” in phrases such as igniting the nighttime, where assonance may conceal our awareness of the subject matter. This is also seen in this unique tug-of-words,

our bodies
flail within the flames
waving like an ocean of enraged kelp

In the second sequence, I found unique cinematic scenes in the poem, “From Corn to Sea” with each stanza using the first person, I see, I fear, I run, I sail, I feel, I fade, I wake, I pull, I shudder, I rise, I hear. This leaves us with a strange and effective sensory overload, willing us to also see, feel, shudder, run, fear and fade. This line reminds me of the Alien films,

I pull
and my cheeks peel from the muscle, shreds
from bone

A revelatory moment comes upon the insight that perhaps the haunting figure on the cover might actually be the narrator. This awareness arrives in the poem, “Burning on re-entry,”

I was everything.
I was the gravity of a black hole
in the icy chars of a comet.
//
I hit the blue-domed atmosphere,
ready to split, ready to shatter.
//
I am ash,
a char upon the glass desert.

This collection is not for the fainthearted; it displays gore, guts and grime, while at the same time displaying the beauty of language. This sensory narrative gives an almost tactile impression of a nuclear fallout and the aftermath of decay. We see this in the poem, “Covet,”

When our bones
were crushed
into the asphalt dream,

as I watched you turn to liquid
and your marrow
soak into earth,

Other equally chilling lines include, ash caskets rain from Eden’s Skyline, in “Prisoner Zero.” And in “Witness to a Schoolyard Burial” we find, Atomic children stir below the grasses, / continuing education in soil spit. And in “Impressions,”

gullies filled with flakes of flesh,
their fodder-formed whispers
curdled, weaved in dust.

In the last poem, “A Final Visitation to our Monumental Glass Desert,” Gray holds our attention with lines such as, bone canyons with web-nested eyes / spilling regret from cavernous sockets, and continues the spell to these very last lines,

Blood and tears
are encased within
like swirls inside a marble,
mixed with all that liquid skin,
curled in slithers of flesh-resin tongues.

Gray’s thoughts go beyond the poems, as we find in his own description of the book’s lingering questions: Let us witness the horrors of an apocalyptic dreamscape. Let us witness the horrors that await these lucky ones called survivors . . . What will become of our Children of the Fallout? Will they live beyond Death’s second coming, or are they simply doomed to fade away?

In his first chapbook, Come Fly with Death – Poems Inspired by the Artwork of Zdzislaw Beksinski (Marrowroot Press), and in his horror novel, Feeding Lazarus (Jaded Books Publishing), Gray displays equally gruesome language and his great skill at writing horror. His work reminds me of Stephen King. In all of these books, he poses existential questions for humanity.

As an author of fiction and a poet, Wesley D. Gray is a writer of things that are mostly strange. He is an Active member of the Horror Writers Association, as well as a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association. His other books include Come Fly with Death: Poems Inspired by the Artwork of Zdzislaw Beksinski, and the horror novel, Feeding Lazarus (originally published as Rafe Grayson). When he isn’t writing, Wesley enjoys geek status while claiming to be: a tabletop gamer, a reader, a dreamer, a veteran, a Trekkie, a Whovian, an amateur photographer, a radiographer, nature-lover, coffeeholic, boxed wine enthusiast, and an all-around nice guy, among other things. He resides in Florida with his wife and two children. Learn more at the author’s website: WesDGray.com.

Title: Tears on the Glass Desert
Author: Wesley D. Gray
Publisher: Marrowroot Press, 2021
Format/Price: Kindle Edition ($ 0.99), Paperback ($5.99)

Don Beukes is a South African, British and EU writer. He has written Ekphrastic Poetry since 2015 collaborating with artists internationally. He is the author of The Salamander Chronicles, Icarus Rising-Volume 1 (ABP), an ekphrastic collection and Sic Transit Gloria Mundi (Concrete Mist Press). He taught English and Geography in both South Africa and the UK. His poetry has been anthologized in numerous collections and translated into Afrikaans, Persian, French, Kreole (Mauritius) and Albanian. He was nominated by Roxana Nastase, editor of Scarlet Leaf Review for the Best of the Net in 2017 as well as the Pushcart Poetry Prize (USA) in 2016. He was published in his first SA Anthology In Pursuit of Poetic Perfection in 2018 (Libbo Publishers) and his second Cape Sounds in 2019 (Gavin Joachims Publishing, Cape Town). He is also an amateur photographer and his debut Photographic publication appeared in Spirit Fire Review in June 2019.

Risa Denenberg is the curator at The Poetry Cafe Online.