This Crisis, These Blessings: Essays

This Crisis, These Blessings is a series of twelve beautiful experimental essays on womens' experiences of crisis, illness, rape, motherhood, housework and family travel.
Essays tell us what to think about, and how to live. These sensory, lyrical narratives of decision-making show women turning suffering into understanding, grief into poetry and tragedy into renewal. The theme of This Crisis, These Blessings is: Women are who we are- unfinished, ill, well, biologically and culturally diverse, erotic, gorgeous, good, ever changing. We should fly like angels.
This book is helpful in medicine and counselling. Medicine and therapy improve if practitioners read about suffering and use literature in their practices.
Cathy Stonehouse, author of The Words I Know, and the essay "In the Presence of Grace" (Dropped Threads Three) says, "Out of the crisis that is contemporary womanhood, Deirdre Maultsaid's voice sings out sure and clear. Whether drawn from her life as teacher, mother, sexual assault survivor or traveler, Maultsaid's fragments and reflections illuminate through challenging, refuse to excuse themselves, choose instead to bless their reader with wounds. Ready to revolt? Stubborn, lush, combative and irreducible, Maultsaid's lyric rants invite us in to a world where too much is known, and like water, we rise."
Mark Anthony Jarman, author of Salvage King, Ya , and 19 Knives says, "These essays are disturbing and cumulative and unexpected..."