You Kept Your Secrets

In You Kept Your Secrets about her grandson's suicide at age 18, poet Helen Marie Casey writes, "I am afraid to look, afraid there will be nothing everywhere." But she does look-with love, grief, and beauty-at the measure of his height still on the wall, at the tree where he hanged himself, at the hawk she hopes her grandson has become. "Sometimes that is everything there is." It's a sad and lovely book.

-Penelope Scambly Schott, Oregon Book Award recipient and author of On Dufur Hill

In this deeply affecting collection, Helen Marie Casey chronicles the aftermath-and persistence-of loss in the absence of a beloved child. "What do we become when we cease to be/who we were?" the poet asks, a question that resonates for subject, author, and reader alike. These poems both celebrate a brief life, "you, /young boy, hawk-like, spreading/your sweatered wings wide" and map the ever-widening circles of pain and joy.

-Susan Edwards Richmond, Before We Were Birds

Helen Marie Casey's chapbooks include Zero Degrees, Fragrance Upon His Lips, and Inconsiderate Madness, a finalist for the Julia Ward Howe Award of the Boston Authors Club. She has also written a biography, My Dear Girl: The Art of Florence Hosmer. In addition, she has written a monograph, "Portland's Compromise: The Colored School 1867-1872" and has won the Black River Chapbook competition of Black Lawrence Press, the 14th National Poet Hunt of The MacGuffin, and the Frank O'Hara Prize from The Worcester Review. Her work appears in several poetry journals, including, among many others, The Laurel Review, Louisiana Literature, CT Review, The Worcester Review, Paterson Literary Review, Prairie Schooner, The Comstock Review, The Christian Century, Westchester Review, Peauxdunque Review, Greensboro Review, and The MacGuffin.