the stars, your eyes

These poems explore a couple’s love for each other in the face of the challenging diagnosis of an incurable disease. The speaker attempts to “practice” grief and prepare herself for a future alone. Reading will find support as they deal with the challenges of aging, caretaking and grieving.

Praise for the stars, your eyes

“With lyricism that expresses a range of emotions, Terry S. Johnson charts the painful journey through her beloved’s illness, death, and beyond. These poems do not shy away from the harsh realities of navigating a dizzying array of treatments, procedures, and routines that ‘no one has prepared us for.’ Underneath the pain is the acknowledgment that ‘we must create a new lexicon, shape our denouement.’ As readers, we experience Johnson’s loss and acceptance as she chooses a new landscape where ‘increasing spring light sprouts green.’

Gail Thomas, author of Leaving Paradise, Odd Mercy, and Waving Back

“‘I’m ready for spring as my beloved prepares / for dying, and so I am preparing, too.’ Each poem in Terry S. Johnson’s heart-rending book is a beautifully sculpted vessel holding the weight of the speaker’s shifting grief witnessing her partner’s illness through the crushing reality of his death to a new territory of resilience, where ‘the refrain’ of her love’s absence blossoms in a new pitch.’ The title elegantly captures that ineffable sense of great loss becoming a greater presence, love’s north star. ‘I have become the night. / The stars, your eyes.

Patty Crane, author of Bell I Wake To and translator of The Blue House: Collected Works of Tomas Tranströmer

ISBN  978-1971191010

38 pgs.   $13.95     © 2026    

Shanti Arts Publishing

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