Overview

The Ferry Keeper is the winner of the 2024 Grayson Books Chapbook Contest. Judith H. Montgomery cared for her mother and father in their declining years, as well as for her husband in his cancer journey. The Ferry Keeper chronicles her care for her parents on their final journey. These eloquent poems shine with love and resiliency.

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"Judith Montgomery's The Ferry Keeper is a gorgeous tribute to the poet's aging parents, weaving poems about human resiliency in the face of nature's afflictions. Every line of these poems sings with a taut lyrical music. When her father enters hospice, Montgomery wants to ""fill his failing body"" with Bach's St. John Passion, hoping that the CD will ""carry him on a skiff / of sound across the slow lake of leaving."" With the precision that only love can summon, Montgomery charts her parents' passing, ""safe in that shadow where / all of us must end."" -Joan Baranow, author of Reading Szymborska in a Time of Plague In these lucent poems of love and witness, the narrator likens herself to a ferry keeper whose body becomes a boat tasked with bearing her ""pale family""-an Alzheimer's-stricken mother, a son with incurable brain cancer, an aging father who fights the decline into infirmity-across ""the slow lake of leaving."" Beginning with a photograph of her parents dancing in their youth, we journey through the heartbreaking, all-too-familiar inevitability of their loss. This is a voyage we all must make-for ourselves and for others-captured with impeccable grace and artistry. -B. Fulton Jennes, author of FLOWN and BLINDED BIRDS Judith Montgomery's poetry reveals a deep comprehension of human existence and mortality. In vivid narratives and evocative images, the reader is situated in an atmosphere of seeming placidity, which upon further reading is surrounded by shadows of transience and ephemerality. These poems encapsulate the sharp and familiar consequences of living in a human body with all its attendant emotions. With masterful poetic craft as well as a finely developed ear for internal rhyme, Montgomery ferries us on one family's journey through the landscapes of life and death with all of its victories and defeats. -Margaret Stawowy, editor, Storms of the Inland Sea: Poems of Alzhheimer's and Dementia Caregiving"

Author Information

Judith H. Montgomery holds a PhD in American Literature from Syracuse University. Montgomery's poems appear in many literary journals and anthologies. She's been awarded fellowships in poetry from Literary Arts and the Oregon Arts Commission; residencies from Playa, Hypatia-in-the-Woods, and Caldera; and prizes from the Bellingham Review, Persimmon Tree, and elsewhere. Her first chapbook, Passion, received the 2000 Oregon Book Award for Poetry. She is also the author of Red Jess and Litany for Wound and Bloom.

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