Sarah Ann Winn

They Aren’t Your Ducks

Arts & Literature

“In They Aren’t Your Ducks, Sally McGreevey Hannay writes a window into the experience of losing a child to addiction. These tender poems swim the ocean of grief, guilt, and isolation, navigate that fear of drowning in loss, of being overwhelmed with its scale, its permanence. Hannay allows the form of the sestina to appear and reappear, a perfect setting for the ill-logic of denial, the obsessive and helpless hold that watching someone slip away can have, and, later, the revelation in breaking those patterns of thought and practicing peace in riding that ninth wave which ‘has the scope to crush you. If you’re shoulder deep in the game, / you simply must swim to it.’ There is strength and hope in these beautiful poems, and solace for the reader trying to stay afloat in troubled waters.”