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Oblivescenceis Kelly R. Samuels' second full-length collection of poetry, a book carried by a daughter's relationship with her mother as they navigate the latter's struggle with dementia due to Alzheimer's—a condition that approximately 6.5 million Americans are battling. This book of memory and loss is rich in imagery as well as metaphor, and threaded with allusions to Greek mythology, clinical psychology, and gardening. Readers of all kinds, but especially caregivers, mothers, daughters, and medical staff, are sure to be moved by this written exploration of what it means to remember.

Advance praise for Oblivescence

“Who are we when our memories are lost, when we know ‘it’s rained’ but we also know that ‘something’s missing?’ And who are we if the one we love no longer remembers us—when we have two different stories and always must wonder ‘what words / will be the same?’ In this powerful, devastating collection on Alzheimer’s and dementia, Kelly R. Samuels invites us into the expansive and boundless world of memory loss, to ask these brave and important questions. Told in the voice of a mother who has forgotten and a daughter who tries to remain anchored in spite of her mother’s lost memories, Oblivescence is a frank, striking record of the human experience when we consider what is lost—yes—but also what can be found.“

- Joan Kwon Glass, author of Night Swim

“With grace and lyricism, Kelly R. Samuels explores the terrain of forgetting and of the forgotten, and the transformation of self in this new geography, ‘what with all that has been and has been reconstructed.’ Chronicling dementia’s process of subtraction in her mother, Samuels reveals how our perceptions of time may be as unreliable as memory. Yet, within the space that loss creates, poetry enters and names the ordinary truths of our lives.”

- Jane Newkirk, editor at Medmic

“The incandescent poems in Kelly R. Samuels’ Oblivescence witness a parent’s devastating descent into illness, into ‘some sort of absence.’ Here, words on ‘scattered pieces of paper’ serve as ‘navigational tools’ toward a coveted wholeness, language becoming both an anchor and a map for the quickly receding memory. Oblivescence is a tender tribute to mothers and daughters, to the necessity of language despite its inevitable dissolution, and to our inexhaustible human capacity to give voice to the unsayable: ‘that unnamed longed for.’”

- Romana Iorga, author of Temporary Skin

“Oblivescence tests the line between what we say and who we are: ‘You’ll tell the story. / I’ll tell the story. / What words will be the same?’ As a mother’s dementia progresses, memories grow motheaten and encounters slippery. But stripped of language’s pretense, the resulting flashes and fragments, the orphaned prepositions and double negatives bring us to the edge of what matters: inescapable material truths—’the scrap of chamois oily with furniture spray and resentment,’ ‘the rattle of lids and rings’—and intimate experiences alive in moral detail, like the burying of a dead deer: part frenzy, part rectitude, part tenderness. Samuels’ inquiries into accumulation and crumbling—as delicate as they are stoic—give these poems a hallowed feel. The collection serves as poet’s observation and daughter’s plea: ‘how you look at me / with nothing of recognition, trying / to piece it all together. Make it whole.’”

- Allison Adair, author of The Clearing

Cover design & interior illustrations by Kate Netwal.

ISBN 9781959525998

Publication Date: February 22, 2024