Still Here

Sam Norman's, Still Here, is an autobiographical chronicle-in-verse of a man trying to come to grips with the sudden death of his 20-year-old son, Ben, who was just killed in a car accident. The poems in this book take the reader on a journey from the days immediately following the tragedy to about four months later. Here are the verses of a man beyond bereaved... but, despite his unbearable grief, Sam still has one outlet: poetry. Here are those poems, readable and accessible, by way of which Sam tells us that he's still here. Still here - waiting for the time when he might meet up again with his beloved Ben... Ben, who's still here too, in Sam's dreams and memories and prayers and now, too, in his profound poetry.

-Firestone Feinberg, editor, Verse-Virtual

This book should come with a warning that read, "These poems will take you somewhere that no one should ever have to travel. Enter at your own risk." In his debut collection, Still Here, Sam Norman writes of the daily torture of living with the loss of a child, and he does so in poems that are, at once, brilliant and harrowing. Sam Norman writes Everything looks more fragile, more easily broken. Nothing is as sturdy or as permanent as I once thought. Enter at your own risk. You will never be the same when you return.

John L. Stanizzi is the author of Ecstasy Among Ghosts, High Tide-Ebb Tide, Four Bit, Chants, and many other titles.

Reading this collection of poems, I am aware that we are holding in our hands Sam Norman's "shattered pane of stained glass." There is such wholeness in these shards, such honesty about an event that can't possibly be true. This is an anthology I would put into the hands of every one of my students as a chance for them to witness a father's love for his son through beautiful imagery, raw observations, and piercing echoes of desperate prayers. Still Here pulls readers not only to a place of devastating loss, but also to a place where the love of family, faith, and familiarity can ground us during the tearing winds of change. Sam Norman's hellish experience has resulted in a book that I will read again and again, an affirmation that there is power in poetry sourced ardently from the power of love.

Karen Christianson, Poetry Out Loud Coordinator, AP/ECE instructor, Bacon Academy.