50 Miles

This isn’t a book about failed relationships, or loss, or grief, or addition or parenting. It is much more than that. To give it a label is to strip away the beauty of it—how these essays dissect and interweave and meditate on the emotional complexities of being a part of a world that constantly breaks our hearts. It is about love, yes, and guilt, yes, and pain, yes, and memory that clings and holds and haunts. Sheryl St. Germain has created worlds within these pages—some in the unreal plains of a video game, some in the fraught vulnerabilities of motherhood—where she unspools a life cut short and how to reconcile and forgive and remember. —Ira Sukrungruang, Buddha’s Dog & Other Meditations

About the author:

Sheryl St. Germain has published six poetry books, three essay collections, and co-edited two anthologies, for which she has received numerous awards, including two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. Her latest, Fifty Miles, a collection of essays, appeared in 2020 with Etruscan Press. Recently retired as Director of the MFA Creative Writing program at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, she now resides in Savannah, Georgia, where in addition to writing, she makes fiber art. 

Sheryl’s son, Gray, died in 2014 of a drug overdose.  Her last book of poetry, The Small Door of Your Death, (Autumn House Press) and her latest collection of lyric essays, Fifty Miles, both take as their subject the life and death of her son, and offer a personal look at the toll addiction takes on family and country.

$17.00