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Gloria Heffernan's collection of poetry What the Gratitude List Said to the Bucket List contains poems that dance between mourning and morning, grief and blessing, aspiration and finality. In one poem she looks through her deceased sister's trifocals. As a metaphor these trifocals provide us with a way to view her poetry as engaging three prevailing interlocking themes: family (and relationships), place, and language. Always, she delights in "the maze of language,/ mesmerizing me with its/ texture and taste...." Through a spiraling out of words and wisdom, she creates vivid epiphanic stories. I welcome this book with much gratitude—and encourage you to put it on your own bucket list.
—Patrick Lawler, author of Child Sings in the Womb and Feeding the Fear of the Earth
As we read Gloria Heffernan's new poetry collection, What the Gratitude List Said to the Bucket List, we come into the sacred space that Heffernan's love of language and life has made. Within this vibrant book, mourning and morning beautifully fuse as all poems become love poems, for here in these pages even deep and terrible grief is held, here strangers have kind hands, and small paradises are found both in clouds and in the workaday world. When she was a child, Gloria Heffernan's mother told her, "Go write a story." We are so lucky she did.
—Annie Lighthart, author of Iron String
Gloria Heffernan's What the Gratitude List Said to the Bucket List is a study in balancing desire against need, grief against acceptance, and the known against the mysterious. What can't her imagination render both familiar and new at once? Here is a child who, in the wake of Kennedy's assassination, discovers the magic of language...a woman who, being lifted in a harness by a helicopter after a medical emergency, still manages to appreciate a view that "tourists can't buy." The poems here exhibit an eye for careful detail that is equally adept at rendering anew a garage sale, a husband’s snoring, a struggling parent, or an ICU room. This is a heart-felt and heart-moving new book.
—Philip Memmer, author of Pantheon
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