Half-Life, Paperback

Fuller's Half-Life spans the many years it takes to come to terms with the suicide of a husband and its traumatic effect on the children: drug abuse, rape, unflinching self-analysis, survivor's guilt; the loss here is hardly manageable. The poems look to the self but also outward, to the bird feeder and garden, to the paintings of the masters, to Greek mythology, to the music of a fiddle teacher, to the dangerous beauty of southeastern Ohio's sandstone cliffs. In the face of death, the poems ask, What do the living know? They know immense grief; how brutal and dark our human natures can be; that healing requires engagement with the physical world.