The Life You Gave Me

In the striking and profoundly tender collection, The Life You Gave Me, Claire Drucker skillfully probes what it means to be a daughter, a mother, and an occupant of a climate in crisis. There is devastating loss and grief in lines such as, "What am I left holding? Who am I now?" and also a buoying of something sweeter: "jade hues," "apple heaven on our lips," "shared comfort of cool, sun-kissed skin." I keep returning to these poems, moved by the way they chart the terrain of love, identity, and renewal. This is a capacious and wise book that reckons with the indelible nature of ancestry, the fragility of a fractured democracy, and the community and meaning found when "we lean in with love, for any kind/of freedom."

-Emily Jern-Miller, author of You Are Not a Bird

The poems in Claire Drucker's collection The Life You Gave Me offer readers "a new kind of stillness, /a new kind of alive." The poet's voice calls us to attention with compassion and deep tenderness for a world ravaged by fire and floods, splintered by politics and pandemic, braving grief and love and loss. Through all, the poet reaches back in time to the Holocaust memories of immigrant grandparents and forward to the immanent devastation of our planetary home. But always the force of language roots us in the miraculous now, with "change, /that sly beast, /always the only//hook we can hang our coats on."

-Terry Ehret, author of Lucky Break and Night Sky Journey

Claire's Drucker's poetry collection The Life You Gave Me is a love letter to three beloveds: her late mother, her daughter, and the natural world. Each poem sizzles with precise, well-considered language and sensory images that made me sigh and moan by turns. Her subjects span the fraught relationship with her mother, wildfires, visits to the beach, Covid life, and more. In the poem "Apple Juicing," she writes, "even the wasps are doing what they should, / their legs sticky with sugar, languid/ and drowning in the garnet liquid." This is a work of depth, beauty, and many moods, one to savor and reread.

-Sandra Anfang, author of Finishing School (Kelsay Books, 2023)