The poems in The Recovery House take the reader on a journey that is both surprising and familiar. Due to a genetic condition, the poet anticipates one loss (that of her hearing), but is given another in the dissolution of her twenty two year marriage. The connection between loss and beauty is highlighted, while nature provides a ballast. The Recovery House encourages us to keep going; to grieve/be joyful/pour the tea.... the redbud blossoms are in the future again!

WITHOUT SOUND

I can finally see the birds

the birds.

Cynthia Henebry is a graduate of Bates College, The Academy for 5 Element Acupuncture, and Virginia Commonwealth University's School of the Arts. Her photographs have been exhibited at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, The National Portrait Gallery, and countless galleries and small museums through the United States. She lives in Richmond, Virginia where she was born, and in families and communities with whom she is committed to heal.

"The Recovery House is a sublime work, at once bracing and beautifully supple. Each poem tells its own story. Together, they form a requiem of the human heart." — Andrea Elliott, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Invisible Child

"Cynthia Henebry's The Recovery House, is beautifully done, with stunningly clear, poignant poems that take the reader on a journey through deafness, motherhood and heartbreak. Through it all there is acceptance and grace—and always an appreciation for what nature provides to heal and understand the soul. Words so steeped in emotion they are almost tactile--palpable. Sparing, vulnerable poems that allow the reader to hear the silence and even beauty of these losses. Henebry's work is deeply connected to the meaning and magic of the everyday moment." — Amina Luqman- Dawson, Newbery Medal winner and New York Times bestselling author of Freewater.

"The Recovery House maps the raw geography of simultaneous upheaval where amazement and devastation occupy the same breath. Cynthia Henebry's voice is unflinching, lyrical, and wise, capturing a life caught between awe and anguish. These are brave poems that don't turn away from life's brutal timing, remaining fiercely present to wonder—the light / trailing the trees as I went—and the complicated beauty of being utterly, recognizably human." — Holly Wren Spaulding, author of Familiars and If August, and founder of Poetry Forge.