Lana Hechtman Ayers: Overtures

The Poetry Box

The Poetry Box May 2026

Life is fleeting, death inevitable. Still Life with Sorrow & Joy contemplates death from myriad vantage points, including communication with those gone via letters or phone or from within the landscape of dreams, embracing the possibility of a forever connection between souls. These poems are infused with images of the cherished times spent with family and beloved pets—sweet, aching memories, as well as with images of nature’s bounty—the sublime night sky, the rush of waves, the patter of raindrops. The poet faces her own aging and mortality with a sense of acceptance, hope, and even humor. Perhaps death and what follows death will always remain somewhat of a mystery, but death’s dark shores can be illuminated and mapped, as they are in this collection, by thoughtful and heartfelt meditations, offering readers comfort and companionship as we all journey towards our great unknowable end.

“As easily as water, that’s how I want to leave this earth writes Lana Hechtman Ayers, in this, her stellar, fourteenth collection, Still Life with Sorrow & Joy. The poems curated here are, in part, a feast of losses, but the work moves through several registers; I love that there’s also dark comedy, imaginings of the afterlife, and most of all a fierce love for this world. Ayers knows how imagination is part dream…dipperful by dipperful, how the sky is a blue door that opens both ways. Over and over again, I came across lines that I wish I had written. Hard-earned wisdom and a belief in wonder keep showing us, as readers, how to appreciate this life, sawdust scattering around us like starlight, like meteor shower. This is a book you’ll want to hold close.’”

—Susan Rich, author of Blue Atlas

“Still Life with Sorrow & Joy is a joyous celebration of both. Yes, poet Lana Hechtman Ayers laments, I can’t handle another / dead dog, / dead aunt, / dead lover, / dead plumber, / dead fly even , but even this list carries a kind of delight in its unexpected variety. Or how to describe the rush of time: Hours are field mice / flitting in every direction . Ayers has learned to carry the pebbles / of grief in my arms / without dropping a single one. Indeed, this collection makes them shine.”

—Penelope Scambly Schott, author of Sophia & Mr. Walt Whitman and gOD: A Respectfully Divergent Testament

“This exquisite series of poems is an extended meditation on death, loss, remembrance and transformation through the interaction between the dead and the living, the living speaker’s deepest dreams of the beloved departed. Lana Hechtman Ayers’s speaker, who calls herself a splintered self who practices a shoddy Buddhism, enacts the growing lyricism of her poetic voice throughout this collection. As she recalls, for example, the wonder of first experiencing the Big Dipper during a blackout, when her native New York City is plunged into darkness in a five-borough power outage, she watches her father frame the constellations for her with his hands, and her child-turned-adult self still feel[s] its pulse / orbiting the fatherless galaxy of my heart. We readers know that we are in the presence of a powerful sensibility, as the poet summons us to come like a clock that chimes all hours, and we must heed her voice, because (as she addresses the force of life itself ) each day you fly the moon over my house / like a flag of welcome. This is a poet who can teach us how to live, with joy, with our own dying, and what better cause for celebration could we have?”

—Carolyne Wright, author of Masquerade and This Dream the World: New & Selected Poems

Artist Studio, Condemned

I want to own the ocean, carry it inside me, soul of persistence, engine of timelessness. Instead, I walk around, grief swirling through my veins. Cut me and I bleed gray. No, you say, impossible but fields of mustard inhabit the past. Somewhere there’s a library from which all anatomy books have been stolen. This year the lavender lost its scent and its way. The serenity of salmon is the same river of their birth as their death. My neighbor is building a new porch. Perhaps she’ll raise a swing to watch sunsets, like the satisfaction of the second hand on a clock that never stops circling. My father was partial to tapioca pudding with, he requested, enough whipped cream heaped on top to tickle the clouds. How can anyone define happiness better than that?