An unflinching and tender recollection of illness, death, and grief, sensitively exploring the dynamic between the burden of care and the burden of dying.

Carolyn Smart’s latest poetry collection offers a striking meditation on the death of her partner of nearly forty years. Structured in five distinct parts, this deeply moving book unfolds like a tragedy—each section like an act in a play, the individual poems key scenes in a shared life coming to an end.

The language in Breath Taking is direct and exacting, with colloquial phrases that animate and complicate the emotional pressure of the work itself. Familiar references are scattered throughout—Gould Lake, Road 38—not as a device, but as indications of the everyday world that love, pain, and death inhabit.

Intimate and exhaustive, this generous document doesn’t lean on a belief in God or the afterlife, nor does nature’s continuity offer an uncomplicated source of comfort. Instead, what is revealed is the unvarnished reality of love and loss—the arduous responsibilities, the fragile attempts at recovery, the wishful thinking that what is gone will one day return. Breath Taking is a profound, vital reflection on the end of a life, and on those who go on living.