New Wilderness

Jenifer DeBellis

New Wilderness takes readers through the nuances of raising a mentally ill child whose young adult brain cancer experiences transport this daughter and mother into an uncharted wilderness. With little more than a demagnetized compass and crayon-drawn treasure map, the daughter travels deeper into wastelands. Four states away, her mom charts a new topography to smuggle her back to civilization. The poems in this collection build on a triangulated path that moves between life before, during, and after cancer. Despite compounding loss, disappointment, and destruction, Jenifer DeBellis’s versified narratives reveal that paths forged with love can lead even the wildest creatures out of bewildering terrain.

PRAISE FOR NEW WILDERNESS
“Yes, this collection has fortitude and resilience in spades, but DeBellis arrives at these only after meticulously surveying the wreckage that illness makes of good intentions…Not an easy read, New Wilderness, but one that…leaves us with a blueprint for bearing the slings and arrows of any human life.”
—Iain Haley Pollock, author of Ghost, like a Place

“The real splendor of New Wilderness is in the variety of beautifully crafted poetic forms; poems which themselves are objects of rescue, for they bring order to all the contextual turmoil. I could not put this book of valorous verse down.” —Joy Gaines-Friedler, author of Capture Theory

“DeBellis’s use of image, humor and irony…allows readers to navigate emotional highs and lows of mental/physical health as a survivor would and, hopefully, understand the unique power of women, of mothers and of poetry.”
—Brad Johnson, author of Smuggling Elephants Through Airport Security​