My Ordinary Life is a book of story poems, a blend of genres. The heart of the book takes us through the beginnings of the Covid pandemic through the waves of vaccinations and variants to the point where Covid was no longer seen as a deadly threat.
Interwoven are stories of friends who were lost, the pain and fear of isolation, the confusion of the world opening and closing again. Abbott interweaves his own aging, the deaths of both of his parents and the growing awareness and appreciation of the simple gifts of everyday life.
The long pause of Covid allowed him to look more deeply at what would have been transient in his formerly busy life, be that the birds and frogs in his garden, the companionship of his cats, the small interactions with service workers and friends. He explores the intersections of grief and gratitude in a wide variety of situations.
My Ordinary Life is as therapeutic as it is poetic with an affirmation of trauma that begins to allow it to surface and be healed.
"By personal experience, training, and as a practicing therapist for many decades, Franklin Abbott has gained and shared deep insights into human thinking and behavior. In My Ordinary Life, his third book of poems, he has used lucid and lyrical phrasing to apply this valuable awareness to his own life and the lives of many others he's known and loved in recent years. My first reaction on hearing his new title was that this life, even in its simplest daily minutiae, has been anything but ordinary. I'm confident that anyone who learns about it in these pages will agree." - Don Perryman, author of the poetry collection, Hearts Bigger than Brazil
Franklin Abbott was raised and educated in the Deep South where he has lived most of his life. He attended undergraduate school at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia and received his master's in social work at the University of Georgia. He has lived in Atlanta since the late '70's and was a psychotherapist in private practice for over forty years. His work as a therpist spaned three great American traumas, the AIDS epidemic, 9/11 and Covid. He specialized in spiritual issues, medical trauma, relationships and group dynamics. He was part of the early Radical Faerie movement and the pro-feminist men's movement and edited 3 anthologies on men and masculinity. Boyhood: Growing Up Male, his last anthology was republished by the University of Wisconsin Press. Abbott served as poetry editor for RFD magazine and Changing Men magazine. He was a conference organizer for he National Organization of Men Against Sexism, Gay Spirit Visions and founded the Atlanta Queer Literary Festival. Among the poets and writers he was closest to were James Broughton and Assotto Saint.
Deeply interested in other cultures, Abbott has travelled extensively in the developing world where he has made many friends. He has delivered talks at Joshi Bedeker College in Mumbai, India, facilitated the first Eurofaerie gathering in the Netherlands and written extensively of his travels in Ghana, Venezuela, India and Japan. He is just returning from India where he gave readings in Delhi and Chandigarh and attended the Jaipur Literature Festival. His interest in non-Western culture is inspired by his love of art and music but more deeply by looking for universal threads in spiritual tradition and understanding how consciousness is experienced differently in different cultures.
