Hello! It is my grand pleasure to let you know that my latest book of poetry is available on Amazon. It is a collection that looks at the grief of having a poor connection with parents when they are alive and the grief of their passing. It is a bit of a sad collection, but deals with themes we all struggle with. I want to thank the lovely and amazing James D. Casey IV from Cajun Mutt Press for taking on this collection.
Here are a few reviews from some kind folks:
Layers of Half-Sung Hymns is about heartache, trauma, and one woman’s struggle to become whole again. Touching on the topics of family, addiction, and loss.
“Aleathia’s father named her “truth”, and indeed this is a volume of truth-telling. A professional healer, she fearlessly speaks truth to her family karma and through the love, the beauty, and the pain takes us along on her path to wholeness.”
—Gary Maxwell, Blue Sushi
“Aleathia Drehmer’s work has always touched a part of me that few others have access to and this is no exception. I take a deep breath in with the first poem… this will be introspective; this will be a journey; this will be healing. Where else do you get more than that, than from our beginnings and that which we came? Shit, the beginnings we declare for ourselves, maybe. Aleathia’s journey through her relationship with her mother…and father, her childhood, is somehow both startling while being served with the gentlest of hands. Smart, insightful. The kind of book you want to share with your bestie. Here, read this! Top-notch, highly recommended.”
—Michele McDannold, Space Time Continuum for Dummies (Gutter Snob Press)
“We wear these garments, dwell in these temples briefly. We are short lived, sun worshipers, pale pink blossoms on a Eustacia Vye English rose. Our fine attire covering bones, dancing bones, the bones of life, loving bones. Such are the brutally honest, terribly painful, vulnerable, heart wrenching, masterfully delicately tearfully rendered poems in LAYERS of HALF-SUNG HYMNS by Aleathia Drehmer. I can’t recommend it highly enough.”
—Ron Whitehead, U.S. National Beat Poet Laureate
Stewart Street
We sit on the front porch
of your three-story apartment building,
the wooden planks unkempt
with edges splintering and nails driven up
through rotted holes leaving empty spaces.
You smoke your non-filtered cigarette,
though not the same brand I remember
from childhood, as they smell less aromatic.
It is somehow stale and crumbling like the moments
passing slowly between our shoulders.
Both of us watch my child, with her sun lightened,
blonde streaks curling around her face. She’s cherubic
and fresh sitting in the grass digging for treasure
in the dark earth with an old stick,
looking up at us with untamed innocence.
I think about all the things I want to say
that I won’t ever have the courage to,
or be able to find words good enough
to bear the weight of their meanings. So,
we talk about poems and seasonable weather
and lean only close enough to hear each other.
You turn your head to tell me something important
and I am lost in the sunset reflected off your glasses,
heart beating faster than it should,
unsure of where we go from here.
Aleathia Drehmer, Layers of Half-Sung Hymns
Aleathia Drehmer 