Home Remedies

Sarah Kennedy is the author of five poetry books, including A Witch's Dictionary and Consider the Lilies. An associate professor of English at Mary Baldwin College, she lives in Rockbridge County, Virginia, with her husband.

Exploring modern-day problems that range from strained familial relationships to an individuals struggle to find her place in the world, Kennedys powerful new collection focuses on the 21st centurys intricate connections to the past. Drawing on history as well her personal life, she explores relationships and bodiesboth physical and textual. Kennedy underscores human frailty in poems that dramatize the lives of British women who kept recipe manuscripts containing both medicinal and culinary receipts during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Their trials with illness, childbearing, and aging resonate with contemporary poems about the vulnerabilities of the body in our enlightened age of science. From the seventeenth-century Irish servant Mary Carryll to a contemporary care-giver for a cancer patient, these women leave traces of themselves in diaries, letters, and stories that mark their dedication to the healthy, working body and mind as a source of human dignity.