Oak Cradle - by Chantel L Carlson (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

In 2011 photographer Karen D. Gros made a series of images featuring Emily Knobloch in her family home in Thibodaux, Louisiana, along with heirloom objects found in her attic-old photographs, furniture, and a black linen mourning dress. What Gros never could have predicted is that ninety days after these images were taken, her nineteen-year-old son, Garrett, would die by suicide. He drove his car head on into an oak tree. Gros literally became the mourning woman in the images, and her photography became a way for her to cope with this unimaginable loss. Poet Chantel L. Carlson saw the images in 2015 and immediately wanted to know the underlying narrative.Their ensuing conversations about grief, loss, and perseverance resulted in this magnificent collection of poems and photographs intended to support and remind grieving individuals that they are not alone.

Review Quotes

"Oak Cradle is a magnificent work of both visual and literary art. Chantel L. Carlson's poetry is rich, layered, gorgeous, and lyrical. Each poem evokes the haunting quality of grief that mirrors the southern Louisiana landscape so perfectly rendered in each photograph. The great hope in the dark tunnel of grief is that traveling through its dark tunnels might yield something useful, beautiful, or true, and this book offers some of the most hopeful words I've ever read."

-Christie Tate, author of NYT bestseller GROUP: How One Therapist and a Circle of Strangers Saved My Life and B.F.F.: A Memoir of Friendship Lost & Found

"Oak Cradle is a stunning collaboration that explores the losses that haunt us . . . Poet Chantel L. Carlson and photographer Karen D. Gros create a dialogue of silences and stillnesses across text and image that enacts 'grief without a safety net.' Both writer and artist know how to distill loss, but together the conversation on mourning becomes more complex. Between these pages are bereaved geographies, haunted light, a reclamation of self, the ghosts we knew that know us still."

-Traci Brimhall, Poet Laureate of Kansas (2023-26); author of Love Prodigal, Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod, Saudade, Our Lady of the Ruins, and Rookery

"In this visceral, devastating lamentation, Chantel L. Carlson examines grief, time, and fate through ekphrastic poems that imagine one woman's journey through mourning her son's death by suicide. Photographs by Karen D. Gros provide visual anchors for the imagination as the words and images come together like the joints and sinew of a single body. This collection moved me to consider my own grief as part of a broader picture. It invited me to wonder what it might be like when, after capturing grief in 'a jar-tight lid, ' one day I am able to 'open / the lid and / watch it go.'"

-Joan Kwon Glass, Poet Laureate for Milford, Connecticut; author of Night Swim, How to Make Pancakes for a Dead Boy, and If Rust Can Grow on the Moon