Author Description

The poems in What We Do To Make Us Whole create an intense present that includes the past and future as well. “Who says we can’t go backwards,” one poem asks, and another declares, “The only existence is now and now.” In this book, Christina M. Rau reveals wounds in ways that will invite you to loosen your grip on your own griefs and to join her in reaching toward gratitude and wonder. -Katie Manning, author of Tasty Other and 28,065 Nights In her new book of poems What We Do To Make Us Whole, Christina M. Rau reflects the unstable emotional ground and the eerily vivid world of loss. Doubts, isolation, yearning, and beauty abound in Rau’s poetry, with words that change shape and lines that shift like a moving maze. Rau takes a journey through the emotional muck, and the grace, of grief. What We Do To Make Us Whole is a collection of precious, profoundly sad, and ultimately triumphant poems by a poet who has a unique ability to give magical verse to the mysterious and the mundane. -M.J. Flood, author of Where Are You? Finding Myself in My Greatest Loss