Sonia Usatch-Kuhn

   Sonia Usatch-Kuhn's memorable chapbook, Regarding My Son, is the odyssey of a mother and son through and beyond the "barren pit" of schizophrenia. The mother-speaker is habitually, often desperately, "frozen outside" of her beloved son's "blackened confusion," herself at every moment about to detonate. In prayerful language, at once poised at the brink of desperation and dogged hope – without a whit of sentimentality, cold-eyed, often fierce, always permeated with love – Usatch-Kuhn inches the reader ever closer to the stunning feat that only poetry can achieve – the ultimate triumph of recovery: "I open my eyes / caress your cheek / weave you whole again." These poems brave utterance in face of the direst odds. Such courage. —Joseph Bathanti, Poet Laureate of North Carolina