Waking My Mother, Poems by Angela Alaimo O'Donnell

Angela Alaimo O'Donnell's Waking My Mother reaches through memory to truth, enlarging family history and stories of her mother's life into connections that twine us all: story, spirit, family.

Sample Poems by Angela O'Donnell

"If art is what we do to break bread with the dead (Auden), and rhyme and meter are the table manners (Heaney), then Angela Alaimo O'Donnell's hard-won, well-wrought, acoustically sumptuous poems set forth a proper feast: haunting, abundant, free of pieties. As with any good wake, here the living and the dead behold one another. The kinship is astonishing."-Thomas Lynch

Angela Alaimo O'Donnell has published two full-length collections of poems, Saint Sinatra (2011) and Moving House (2009), and two chapbooks, Mine (2007) and Waiting for Ecstasy (2009). Her work has been published in many journals (including America, Christian Century, Concho River Review, First Things, Hawaii Pacific Review, Mezzo Cammin, New Texas, Potomac Review, RUNES, String Poetry, St. Katherine Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and Xavier Review, among others) and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, the Best of the Web Award, and the Arlin G. Meyer Prize in Imaginative Writing. She is also the author of The Province of Joy, a book focused on the theological imagination of Flannery O'Connor. O'Donnell's memoir, Mortal Blessings, is forthcoming in the Fall of 2014. O'Donnell teaches English & Creative Writing at Fordham University in New York City and serves as Associate Director of Fordham's Curran Center for American Catholic Studies. Readers can visit her on the web at http://angelaalaimoodonnell.com/.

ISBN 978-1625490445, 76 pages

Order from Amazon

Order from Barnes and Noble