These Are A Few Of My Least Favorite Things - Paperback

by Shannon Frost Greenstein (Author)

Spiders. Cancer. Civil war in Syria. Frankly, there are a lot of awful things out there in the world, and most of them aren't fair. But life is so much more than its disasters and grief...and everyone knows that poetry is a balm. These Are a Few of My Least Favorite Things is an account of everything we tend to hate, a deeply personal reflection on trauma and mental illness and the evil clowns who haunt our dreams. It is also an exploration of what we can do with the circumstances we are given; it is a search for gratitude in spite of the pain. By illustrating the many kinds of darkness, this collection ultimately strives to find true sources of light...because for every one of our least favorite things, there is an equal and opposite favorite to love.

Praise for These Are a Few of My Least Favorite Things These Are a Few of My Least Favorite Things is a book that begins--literally--with "a spark" that Shannon Frost Greenstein breathes into a fire that's half hearth, half inferno, and always illuminating. Unflinching and authentic, whether interrogating a history of personal trauma or the poisons of capitalism, Greenstein's poems show us how being a witness to suffering is to become an accessory to suffering, that the pain we internalize becomes what we know foremost about ourselves. "I inhabit -- flawlessly and with surprise -- the character of my own body" Greenstein writes, and it's true: how flawlessly we inhabit our flaws. But then--as Greenstein shows over and over--how wonderful to rise from the wreckage of ourselves and know goodness, beauty, and righteousness. "Today, / I lived and / tomorrow / I will live again."

Todd Dillard, author of Ways We Vanish, finalist for the 2021 Balcones Poetry Award

In These Are A Few Of My Least Favorite Things, Shannon Frost Greenstein sings the body pharmacologic. This is a poetic ode to the soul at struggle with maladies, mental illness and the sometimes malevolence of mankind. It is a masterful medicinal release in verse of the toxins that taint mortality.

Kristin Garth, author of The Stakes and other books