Table with Burning Candle

With a dual sense of convulsion and care, Table with Burning Candle tackles a subject that is every parent's worst nightmare-the death of a child. Grieving the loss of her son to opioid addiction and eventual overdose, Julia Paul questions how to move forward in the face of unspeakable loss. Poems speak to God, the coroner, and death itself. But more so, they confront death, absence, the importance, or lack thereof, of the body, and imagine the afterlife. Yet, as Paul reminds us, everyone knows grief, and sharing grief gives us the courage to live in the madness and beauty of the world, no matter the circumstance.

"Deeply moving, this requiem, this elegy chronicling the stages of grief through multiple lyric modes, these pages are as musical as they are heartbreaking."

-Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic

"The book understands the intimate connection between grief and praise in the loss of a loved child: the inability to praise or even look up and, simultaneously, the knowledge that everything must be praised, even the pain of reading her son's journal that gives 'voice after the silence.' And that is precisely what Table with Burning Candle accomplishes; its emotionally complex rendering of suffering and love knows, finally, that "death creates a space that only love/can fill" and only love can give a voice.

-Robert Cording, author of In the Unwalled City

"Paul embraces the hard task of truth-telling. She does not flinch. She wants us to know her son and his journey, as well as her own. Her poems offer us ways of coming to that understanding, in language both inventive and beautiful. This is an important book."

-Pat Hale, author of Seeing Them with My Eyes Closed

"Julia Paul's intimate conversation with death over the loss of her son to heroin addiction presents as many answers as questions. The only question that remains is-are we too afraid of the answers? Are we too afraid to grieve? In a room of her own, Paul locks the door, dims the light, nestles into her chair and maternally awaits the affirmation within."

-Frederick Douglass Knowles II, author of Sinking in Moonlight Alone

"The mother of an adult son who died of an overdose, Paul offers us a seat at her table of grief, serving poems that vacillate between anguished and angry, hopeless and consumed with magical thinking."

-B. Fulton Jennes, author of Blinded Birds

Julia Paul is the author of Staring Down the Tracks (2020) and Shook (2015). She served as the first Poet Laureate of Manchester, Connecticut (2014-2019), and she currently serves as president of the Riverwood Poetry Series, a longstanding reading series in Hartford, Connecticut.

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