The Hands of Strangers - (American Poets Continuum) by Janice N Harrington (Paperback)
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<p/><br></br><p><b> About the Book </b></p></br></br><i>The Hands of Strangers</i> portrays the tensions and moments of grace between aged nursing home residents and their healthcare workers.<p/><br></br><p><b> Book Synopsis </b></p></br></br><p>Janice N. Harrington's debut collection, Even the Hollow My Body Made Is Gone</em>, won the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize Contest and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Now she returns with a tightly focused collection that never veers away from its subject matter: the inner-workings of a nursing home.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>The Hands of Strangers</em> portrays the tensions and moments of grace between aged nursing home residents and their healthcare workers. What does it mean to be a nurses' aide in a nursing home, the lowest of the low, the typically-female worker who provides physical care for the devalued bodies of the elderly? What is it to live one's remaining life on a county ward as an indigent elder? The poems show women in motion: they lift bodies, push wheelchairs, give treatments, and perform the myriad tasks of caretaking. The poems show aides as anonymous figures laboring under routines, time clocks, and a distant medical hierarchy. They tell also tell the stories of how the nursing home industry reshapes lives, bodies, and identities of both aides and the aged.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Janice N. Harrington's first job was working as a nurses' aide while still in high school in the seventies. She says, "Like many of the 'girls' I worked with, I was young and inexperienced in a workplace that demanded empathy, skill, and compassion for the needs and stories of the elderly. I worked my way through college as a nurses' aide. I wrote The Hands of Strangers</em> because I cannot forget the 'girls' I worked with or the 'residents' under my care. I haven't forgotten what I saw, heard, felt, or learned. Human stories hide behind the walls, the national statistics, and the isolations of institutionalized aging. I wanted to share some of those stories." </p><p> </p><p/><br></br><p><b> Review Quotes </b></p></br></br><br>Most of us do not think much of the frail elderly, the people who require constant care to get to the end of the day, near the end of their lives; still less do most of us think about their caregivers, the paraprofessionals and aides who perform, in nursing homes and outside them, an endless string of repetitive duties. Harrington's arresting book-length sequence of short clear poems takes long looks at these scenes, and at the people in them. -- <em>Publishers Weekly</em> <p/>Janice Harrington's work should be required reading for nurses, doctors and practitioners entering the ward. -- <em>The Washington Independent Review of Books</em> <p/>"Janice Harrington, an accomplished poet and author of children's books, takes on a difficult, deep, yet rewarding topic in this collection of poems regarding life in a nursing home...You will not look at someone in scrubs who you know is not a doctor the same again when you see them in the grocery store at some odd hour, tired as all, buying something for dinner at midnight...The ability of poetry to bring difficult lives into view with empathy is something Harrington handles with the utmost of skill, and I do hope she will continue to apply for all of our profit."--<em>Coal Hill Review</em> <p/>"This book-length collection of poems vividly describes the daily routines and grapples with the philosophical concerns of long-term care, including the complexities of aging, the burdens and rewards of caregiving, and the inevitably of death," says Mullaney. "...you don't need to be a particular fan of poetry to appreciate Harrington's work. Her language, while artful, is rarely esoteric, and many of the poems tell some sort of story or paint a portrait of a character." -<em> Mcknight's Long-term Care News</em><br><br><p/><br></br><p><b> About the Author </b></p></br></br>Janice N. Harrington: Janice N. Harrington writes poetry and children's books. She grew up in Alabama and Nebraska, and both those settings figure largely in her writing. Her first book of poetry, Even the Hollow My Body Made Is Gone (2007), won the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize from BOA Editions and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She is also the winner of a 2007 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship for Poetry and a 2009 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award for emerging women writers. The author as well of award-winning children's books, Harrington now teaches creative writing at the University of Illinois. <p/>
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