Breath Taking by Carolyn Smart

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.

Praise for Breath Taking

“In Breath Taking, Carolyn Smart plumbs the slow motion, ambient horror of caring for a loved one in illness and death, her keen lyric eye set to an impossible horizon like an expert sailor. Smart wades into the love, rage, and piss of grief, confronting meaning and non-meaning, always propelling the poem through and beyond what we can ask of life and its witnesses.” —Adèle Barclay, author of  Renaissance Normcore

“Breath Taking is by turns confessional, intimate, regarding private life in light of its unknowable turn toward the future after the loss of a spouse. In her tending to the outer edge of ordinary things, through and beyond scenes shared with her moribund beloved, Smart manages a humour, both plaintive and lucid, into her poems’ trails of resounding grief, drills for living and letting go.” —Canisia Lubrin, author of The World After Rain

“I’ve seldom read poetry that has felt more raw, more pure, more merciful. In poem after poem, grief rises from the dead to pull the heart out of our breath, take us out at the knees.” —Susan Musgrave, author of Exculpatory Lilies