Those who know Waitsfield author Erika Nichols-Frazer know that she’s not afraid to talk about difficult and painful things in her work. Her memoire, “Feed Me: A Story of Food, Love and Mental Illness, ” explores disordered eating within the context of mental health, bringing topics once discussed behind closed doors out into the open.
She has a new book, a slim volume of poetry entitled “Can you see her, the moon?” out this month that takes a very candid and deeply personal look at pregnancy, miscarriage and loss.
The poems are linear (but not really). A better word might be chonological but that’s not quite right either. They are related to each other in that the author’s progression through the joy of pregnancy and the first signs of something being wrong, then the confirmation, follow one after the other, as well as the loss and the wondering about how to grieve a baby that did not get born, but who had “rooted in my body.”
That’s what she wrote in a poem called “Despair.” Here’s more of it.
“Can my pain, which seems so small compared to the world, also be real
while so many people suffer, hurt, die?
What is the weight of my loss? How long am I allowed to mourn
the life I held in my hands, that had rooted in my body?
Will it diminish the joy of my loved ones? Will it insult someone
else whose pain is larger, heavier? Can I hold pain and empathy in both
hands?
Let us not compare but stand, holding our hearts out
in silence when the words won’t come, in solidarity.”
The poet holds her heart out in this book. It’s brave, painful, poignant and most of all, honest. Nichols-Frazer is also the author of a poetry collection, “Staring Too Closely,” and has an anthology of short stories “No One Will Ever Hear You,” out this month, with a book launch at Bridgeside Books in Waterbury in September. She lives in Waitsfield with her husband Dylan and their daughter Arden, who was born in March, plus their dogs and cat.
