The story behind the cover art…
On June 4, 2015, my husband (Al Bartholet) was in Washington, DC, getting ready for a meeting with someone at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. He had a burning sensation in the crooks of his arms, which did not seem like a big deal until he broke out in a cold sweat. At that point, he phoned “Henry” at the front desk of his hotel room (the Gallery Place Marriott) and asked for help. Henry took immediate action, calling paramedics, getting front-desk coverage, blocking an elevator for quick access, and opening the hotel room door to find Al unconscious.
Boom. Paramedics got him into the ambulance, where Al had his first two cardiac arrests. When they arrived at George Washington University Medical Center (just 2.6 miles away), one ER doctor told me later that they “thought he was dead.” Then, for just over an hour, doctors worked to save his life as his heart stopped multiple more times and they eventually stabilized him and put a stent into his heart.
It was a Widow Maker, and this entire experience--as well as his recovery--was published by Finishing Line Press in a chapbook of poems.
I wrote these poems to help make sense of everything that was happening to Al. I also see these poems as one way that I can honor and thank the many people who worked so hard to save his life. Dr. Ramesh Mazhari (born in Iran)…Dr. Mohammed (I never learned his last name) (from Syria)…ICU nurses Courtney, Sade, Nora, and Ruby…and paramedics who are completely unknown to us.
We owe a debt of gratitude to others, too…friends Bo and Sandie Rose, Jim and Pam Huggins, Eric Nuzum and Katherine Kendall, Nancy Barbour and Phil Kedrowski, Martha Woodroof, Kathy Spano, Professuh Blues (on the air every Saturday night on WMRA!), Matt and Karen Bingay, Bob and Trisha Brown-Leweke, Jeanmarie Badar and Jim Kauffman, Elizabeth Bartz, and others (I’ll include our grown children Mark and Paul Bartholet and Lysa Anderson!). It took a village to save Al’s life…and what a village it is/was!
Praise for Widow Maker
Widow Maker is a powerful collection of poems that draws the reader through the heart-rending trauma and horror, tinged with hope and mercy, that the author and her husband face as he endures a medical crisis that few survive, including “the fear that my heart might continue beating/after his is done.” There are also moments of grace and unexpected joy as the couples’ love persists through the ordeal. While reading, I experienced chills, shed tears, and in the end, immediately had to go back and read it all again. Highly recommended!
–John Burroughs, Ohio Beat Poet Laureate 2019-2021, author of Rattle and Numb
In Widow Maker, Anderson-Bartholet skillfully confronts life in all of its hard and soft urgencies; frailty, mortality, and the literal heart’s “tribal beating.” This collection is part invocation, part accusation—how we both praise and curse the body that both sustains and fails us. But like her narrator, the poet asks the reader to never glance “down or back,” and we don’t want to. This courageous, at times wrenching, collection shows a poet who understands language as grace.
–Jessica Jewell, author of Dust Runner
Widow Maker is an intimate lyric account of a wife’s crossing the threshold of cardiac trauma where “we breathe metrics” after a husband’s failed heart “snaps…in half” the speaker’s own heart. In apt metaphor, the physiology of cardiac arrest is projected into the world outside her door―a world of “slender arteries” of mud daubers’ nests. We lean into these poems to catch every nuance and sift the subtle layering of experience and emotion captured in clean speech lines. In gripping narrative, the poet depicts a season lurking at the “intersection between earth and sky.” This exceptional collection is an invitation to join the poet through the great personal distance she covers: a speaker “stunned” by the widow maker’s work moves through an enormous room of dread, guarded hope and ultimately comes to celebrate and “claim what’s left of the day.”
–Barbara Sabol, author of Imagine a Town
