Ebook
Nothing is more meaningful than family life. This world can seem a beautiful and loving Eden in one moment and the next you can feel buried alive. Your loved ones become sick, or they grow into hellions. Or they don't even make it into this world at all, or they live a long life and then die, leaving you behind. Life is confusing, life is beautiful, life is sometimes overwhelming. Being a mother is at the center of family life, an all-consuming role that sometimes is invisible and other times essential.
This collection is about Meade's world, told through the anatomy of family life. Celia, along with her partner Karl, experienced late miscarriage, the adoption of two beautiful girls, alongside brushes with addiction and loss. These poems are based on feelings that sometimes were fleeting and other times endure. They reflect the life of a poet at a certain point of time, as she is growing older and her children enter into adulthood and continue to evolve.
“We’re told to reach the universal through the particular. Celia Meade knows a path. Sharon Olds once asked—I’m paraphrasing—if poetry is the weak thing it is in our culture or one of the most powerful forces on earth. Meade’s work is inscribed in that tension—the will to create in full knowledge of all the forces that undo us. Empathetic, seeking truths as volatile as our lives, and deeply realized, Anatomy of the World is a book that will last.”
—D. Nurkse, author of A Country of Strangers
“In Celia’s Meade’s Anatomy of the World, we are not spared the tragic ends or visceral complexities of domestic life. We move across the murky boundaries between family relationships and loss. We are offered a glimpse of the redemptive in all its forms. These are bold, muscular poems that do not shy away from the inner and underworlds of humanity. In this fine collection, we join Meade in her persistent excavation of love.”
—Diana Hayes, author of Sapphire and the Hollow Bone
Celia Meade is an MFA graduate of Sarah Lawrence College. She holds an MFA in painting from the University of Calgary, has shown internationally, and lives in Salt Spring Island, Canada and Bronxville, New York. She was runner-up for the Raven Chapbook Award (2022) and has appeared in dozens of literary magazines. Visit her website at https://celiameade.com/.