The poet Ailey O’Toole will be reading from her debut collection, Grief, and What Comes After (Rhythm & Bones Press, 2018).
This fierce first collection, a compilation of pain, rejuvenation and rebirth, pioneers landscapes of forgiveness, where Ailey O’Toole’s poems ascend to create a resting place of self-compassion and atonement. Follow along as O’Toole recounts her journey from emotional decimation to a place of redemption and self-love. Her shuttles of reckoning dive-bomb and crash, but never fail to pull passengers from the wreckage. These poems are a punch to the gut, a heart beating on the page, a nightmare turned daydream, as Ailey O’Toole buries what we hope to find and helps us see grace in the wild. How do we heal after re-injuring ourselves the same way? Following any major collapse, O’Toole helps us to find resiliency within ourselves in her debut collection.