Terhi K. Cherry
 

Feed It to the River, Terhi K. Cherry’s exquisite new chapbook, is like nothing I’ve ever read. The saga of the author’s determined quest for motherhood as the years speed by, “You wiped your face from a romance, walked to the edge of forty, alone, as if it were a cliff.” Cherry fantasizes life as a mother while the counterpoint, her complicated relationship with her own mother, stands as a cautionary tale of what not to do. A remarkable achievement.

~ Alexis Rhone Fancher, author of Junkie Wife, (Moon Tide Press) Erotic: New & Selected, (NYQ Books), poetry editor, Cultural Daily

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Feed it to the River by Terhi K. Cherry invites the reader into the rapids of longing for a child, loss after loss. In opening her womb to doctors, to the rawness of the body exposed in demeaning conditions and situations, she remembers her mother’s suffering from whom she may “carry the roots” of miscarriage. While some poems throb with despair, this reader was left with a reverence for life that Cherry creates with remarkable language and detail that reaches the heights necessary to endure, guided by the knowledge we are made of stars, however we go. Every mother and daughter should read this book, along with those who love them. 

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~ Perie Longo, PhD, LMFT, Santa Barbara Poet Laureate Emerita, author of Baggage Claim (WordTech Editions)

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In Feed It to the River, Terhi K. Cherry tills the grief of infertility, digging deep for its roots in a family legacy of endometriosis and wide in the communal losses of other women with their unfulfilled cravings for motherhood, bringing forth a garden of poems verdant and brave in their vulnerability. Everywhere nature mirrors her losses, answering her litanies of possible faults with its inherent pragmatism, even the falling rain opens its mouth to the sea as if singing, “it was nothing you did.” Feed It to the River reminds us that at the river’s edge on the other side of grief, we may meet ourselves anew.

~ Elya Braden, author of Open The Fist and The Sight of Invisible Longing (Finishing Line Press)