Family

Author: Joy Ladin

Publisher: Persea Books (2024)

Joy Ladin's most autobiographical and socially engaged poetry collection to date, Family is an intimate exploration of private and public loss, resilience, and love. The book begins with “haiku suites,” an invented form through which her mother's dementia and the poet's growing disability are glimpsed by the light of a blossoming world. The lyric narratives that follow portray a widening family circle that also includes estranged children, God, targeted trans women, and Trump-era America. Laden writes with an open heart and a formal grace as the collection concludes with “Autobiography of My Whiteness,” a reckoning with her belated awareness of her place in America's racial hierarchy.