An Infinite Wingspan For Grief and Growth

Described as “an unusually accomplished debut” by Nancy Willard, Psalms for a Child Who Has Lost Her Mother (FinishingLine Press, 2015) complements Carol Japha’s personal and social humanity as an artist, editor, non-profit professional and activist, formerly with Viking Press, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Charles H. Revson Foundation and the Peace Corps.

As Tuesday’s featured reader at Curley’s, Carol will illuminate her quest “to discover the mother I lost so long ago, and myself” through samples of her spare, lyrical writing, expressing the bond between a mother and daughter, identity and connection and other themes from her first chapbook.

The distinctive, even blessed, absence of the maudlin in this detailed chronicle suggests to the author of A Shimmering That Goes with Us, Mary Ann Larkin, a subtle, freeing effect to her work: "It's under an 'infinite wingspan' that Carol Japha gathers together the painful details of a child losing her mother… with no sentimentality,” building to a “revealing achievement” which plants, as the sample below makes clear, one leg in an evolving present, with the other anchored to the legacy that propels it:  

Knapsack

I will carry her in my pocket
like a slingshot
like a candy bar
like change to buy it
like shells from the seashore.
In my knapsack
like a sweater against the cold
a trail map to find my way
a pocketknife
binoculars to see from the top of the hill.

I will ask her
which fork to take
which way to return.

February, 2015

Concurrently, Carol has developed her graphic skills (the cover painting of Psalms is her piece, “The Doll”) through a series of workshops and residencies from Bennington College and the Virginia School of Creative Arts to the Silvermine School of Art in Wilton. A Greenwich resident raised in Chicago, Carol has also studied at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and is a graduate of Barnard College.

Learn more about her work at her blog, www.motherfulchild.com.