The Seven-eight Count of Unstoppable Sadness

A life lived with melancholy, its spikes, its other rhythms, its insistence. In the end, when we learn this part of us is part of us, is not our enemy, when we live long enough to eschew fear of judgments—social, medical, personal—eschew the idea of 'normal' and the label of 'well', what can these undercurrents of sadness teach us?

These lyric poems, written over a decade, don't attempt answers. They emerge from observation, reflection and re-imagining, from the desire to make peace with the self, beloveds, the past. In doing so, they ask if there are other emergent possibilities—patience, acceptance, gratitude, compassion, courage, hope—when we live with sadness that will not be banished, sadness that for the narrator of these poems is as inescapable as the earth on which she stands or the air she breathes.

The Seven-eight Count of Unstoppable Sadness by Marcella Polain explores the depths of melancholy with a poetic embrace.