Maybe, Cicadas

Maybe, Cicadas dives into the turbulent waters of caregiving through poems that explore how to keep loving through the chaos of crisis. Nancy Huggett’s debut collection bears witness to caregivers and the underrecognized realities they experience. When her daughter, after a series of strokes, had brain surgery to address a rare neurological disease, Huggett was catapulted into full-time caregiving to support her daughter’s gradual healing, a journey punctuated with loss, endurance, frustration, and physical aggression. Through a variety of poetic forms, Huggett probes the tensions between love and exhaustion, illness and healing, and fracture and wholeness that distinguish caregiving. She provides readers with poems of relationship, trauma, and astonishment. An unabashed look at the emotional lives of everyone involved in this cocoon of care, Maybe, Cicadas is a work of love, painting a portrait of resilience in a devastating time.