first published in misfit magazine, Editor Alan Catlin
Aleathia Drehmer, Little Graveyards, 2025, 66 pages, $15
Little Graveyards is a small, easily transportable book that will easily fit into your purse or back pocket. I highly recommend taking the poems with you, reading a couple at a time, and saving the rest for later. Aleathia works in health care, if these poems are all based in fact, which I am sure they are, is mostly with aging, near-death people. Even when she is dealing with significant cancer issues of her own, she is thinking of others. The proportion of poems here devoted to herself (one ) to the people she tends to (most of the rest.) is significant. There is no hand wringing or “woe is me,” for this lady. She is that rare person who feels, and conveys, total empathy for someone, clearly dying, who wants someone to respect their life memories as important; their lives mattered, small and as unknown as they may have been, simply because they are human. When she is moved to tears at a person’s deeply felt memories of loved ones you feel moved with her. When I reach the end of the line I would like someone like Aleathia there to hold my hand or just to be that kind face, that someone who really cares.
—Alan Catlin
