Love, Despite the Ache

Winner:
2017 Hamilton Literary Award for Poetry

From the winner of the Acorn-Plantos Award and the Hamilton Literary Award for Poetry comes a deeply felt collection that confronts love, loss and our own mortality.

In Love, Despite the Ache, Chris Pannell captures the sharp pain and complicated love that accompanies his parents’ approaching deaths, and then examines, with gentleness and humour, the passage of the grief and slow resumption of life that occurs once they are gone. In lines that are clear, honest and specific, he unpacks his family histories, examining morning breakfasts and seafaring uncles, wending his way through memories that “jostle like a pack of hungry cats.” In the end, he answers his mother’s heartbreaking question of, “Christopher, will you take me home?” as only a poet can.