Of All That Is Without and Within
poems by
Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas
~112 pages, $17 (+ shipping)
Projected Release Date: August/September 2026
An Advance Sale Discount price of $10 (+ shipping) is available HERE prior to press time. This price is not available anywhere else or by check. The check price is $15/book (which includes shipping & sales tax) and should be sent to: Main Street Rag, 12180 Skyview Drive, Edinboro, PA 16412.
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Of All That Is Without and Within contains multitudes: poems that are playful, joyful, sorrowful, and beautiful, poems full in every sense and way. As a maker, Carol Lynn Grellas ravels words and builds images: “Only the sky is allowed to weep…as it cleans the earth with love.” Her readers feast on what she’s made. ~Natasha Sajé
It was John Locke who first linked memory and growth of the self, and it is Carol Lynn Grellas who shows us how memories get woven with tactile images like birdsong and music to counter the elegiac mode of these remarkable poems. For it is loss that permeates these poems—of family, friends, loves, and yet Grellas shows us so many ways to move beyond that. As she says in one poem: “Oh, little bird, / if there’s such a thing as reincarnation, I hope / to come back as you, oblivious to bad / news and any doomsayer’s predictions.” How she does this is by recognizing “the way a memory is everchanging,”—or as she says in a poem about the nature of long love as not simply a history but a future expressed as “the body’s / need to wrap tomorrow within its fragile // frame, to somehow save the infinite, / no matter how impossible.” This is a remarkable feat as this book moves from loss to something like a transcendental memory, from elegy to a kind of celebration of lives lived. which is to say there is “never the end of the story,” What better gift can a poet bring us? ~Richard Jackson, Author of Footprints and The Heart as Framed: New and Select Poems
Memory rivers through this collection in serpentine sentences that gather and resurrect loved ones, along with the vanished innocence of childhood. Warmed by empathy and sharpened by fierce insight, this speaker does not flinch from “the unkindness of men’s craving,” but nevertheless dwells in the world with an astonishingly open heart, honoring life in all its forms and all its stages, in ways reminiscent of cultures older and wiser than the one we seem to be living in. ~Leslie Ullman
A(Way) Without Light
In the darkness of her own body,
she navigated her way to the bus stop
carefully until she found
the exact place where she waited each
day by the old bridge, a white cane
in her left hand, a cluster of books
in the other. Her hair was neatly brushed
and a ribbon gathered a clump
of blonde curls. When the driver arrived,
he’d swing the door wide open, and
all of us would stand in line behind her
while she pointed her cane like
a douser up the row of steps to her
favorite saved seat by the window.
On our journey to school through morning
traffic, she never spoke
or asked for help but turned her
face towards the warmth of the sun,
her soft cheek resting against
the window’s light like a flower
that blooms in the vase
receiving water.
Vespers Beneath My Window
Letter from our Pastor
At five to midnight, will you ask to be saved—
all your mistakes redeemed as you dash
from one soul to another, shedding
old to new, to become more pure
shaped from alabaster and pearls?
But will it still be you beneath that translucent
gypsum veil? You say you don’t believe,
that there is no higher power, no
God languishing above the clouds
in some orthodox place called Heaven.
If I am there, in the moonlight, and hear
your plea, it will be enough to know
that at least, you asked to be saved.
Burial of Long Ago
Sometimes you appear in the dimming light
as if your death was just a bad dream, as if you
hear me from your silent place of being. I see
your ghostlike image in the hazy moonlight
and I’m a child again, wearing my yellow
nightgown, walking through our old house,
past the hallway and the doorway to your bedroom
where you stopped breathing, where I’m waiting
for you to get up and cook me scrambled eggs—
you, with your bolo tie and penny loafers,
Chesterfields tucked in your shirt pocket.
I watched a movie the other day, The Three
Burials of Melquiades Estrada—if I could have
buried you three times, I’d believe that you
are dead. But never having buried you myself,
even once, not seeing your body lifeless
in the coffin, not kissing your cheek another
time before a military flag was placed over
your grave, the same one I have now, folded
in a triangle saved under glass—it feels as though
you are here in the echo of memories, and part
of me when my hands hold your gold-trimmed
whiskey decanter, and in the glimmer of starlight
through my evening window. Or now, just
remembering your voice, and the way you
used to linger at the kitchen table after making
my breakfast as we’d start the day together,
before the night you guzzled a handful of pills
when no one knew until it was too late, before
my mother called it suicide, before I knew
what death was. If I buried you now, I’d say
you’re absolved from sin, in case that’s why
you keep coming back to me—like the Mexican
cowboy in the movie, whose killer finally finds
redemption for his crime. I would say, I forgive
you, I forgive you for your own killing, for the pain
you’ve left behind, for needing a reprieve
from whatever tormented you enough to do it,
and for the years you’ve haunted me while
I keep trying to envision what your life
would have been…
For My Daughter During the Pandemic
Yesterday when the world felt flat
instead of round, I looked outside
and saw a dead bird on the ground
who’d flown into an edge of sky,
but I was too afraid to open the door
for fear the air might be contaminated—
yesterday, when I sat on the couch
with nothing to do, I stitched
tassels back together one by one
on the pillowcase, the same way my
grandmother used to, her fingers
carrying each stitch over the next
in what seemed an enduring loop—
yesterday, when there was no milk
or flour to make bread, we ate
peanut butter on celery instead
like children growing up during
a war, making the best of our
supplies, and when a girl delivered
our groceries, she backed away
from the door so fast, I couldn’t
even thank her or say goodbye—
yesterday, when I was sitting at
the kitchen table, trying to remember
what day it was, I looked up at the clock
and saw you there, watching me, your
eyebrow raised ever so slightly like an
upside-down smile, and it was enough
to not be alone, and to know you
were capable of such wonders.
Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas is a recent graduate of Vermont College of Fine Arts with an MFA in Writing. In 2012, her chapbook, Before I Go to Sleep, won the Red Ochre Press Chapbook Contest. In 2019, her chapbook An Ode to Hope in the Midst of Pandemonium was a finalist in the Eric Hoffer Book Award, and in 2021, her collection Alice in Ruby Slippers was short-listed for the Eric Hoffer Grand Prize. A thirteen-time Pushcart Prize nominee and seven-time Best of the Net nominee, she was recently awarded a certificate of achievement by the California Writers Club and named Centennial Poet for her contributions to their 100-year celebration.