Risa Denenberg
Risa Denenberg was born in Washington DC in 1950, and has lived in Miami & Tallahassee Florida, New York City, Kunkletown & Philadelphia Pennsylvania, and has made her home in the Pacific Northwest since 2008. She is a family nurse practitioner who has worked for the past five decades in clinical nursing and education in the areas of abortion care, HIV/AIDS, hospice and palliative care, chronic pain management, and family health. She currently volunteers with the Sequim Free Clinic and with End-of-Life Washington, the advocacy group that supports Washington state’s Death with Dignity Law.
Denenberg is a co-founder of Headmistress Press, publisher of lesbian/bi/trans poetry; curates The Poetry Café, an online meeting place where poetry chapbooks are celebrated and reviewed; and is the Reviews Editor at River Mouth Review . She has published eight collections of poetry, including the full-length collections Mean Distance from the Sun (Kelsay Press, 2014) and slight faith (MoonPath Press, 2018), and the chapbook, POSTHUMAN, finalist for the Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Contest (2020).
She lives with her cats, Bo and Tyg, in a place of stunning beauty on the Olympic peninsula in Washington state. From her writing desk, she looks out at Discovery Bay and, on a clear day, can see Mount Baker in the distance. She enjoys yoga, cooking, drawing, and reading. She is currently working on a memoir-in-progress: No Way to Say Goodbye: My Life as a Noncustodial Mom .
About her writing, she says: “There is no doubt that my years as a nurse, witnessing illness, suffering, and death, have been the bedrock of my love of poetry. While my own poems are often suffused with sadness and alienation, I am grateful that writing carves out a place for these emotions.”
Watch a recording of Risa reading selections from Rain/Deweller, along with Joanne Clarkson:
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"ER Doc Dies in Husband's Arms" from Rain/Dweller was featured on Verse Daily.
Poem from Rain/Dweller
Raindweller Learns the Names of Trees
I’ve learned to tell the fir from the yew, the silver from the red cedar. At sunrise, there is a thin glint of light northeastward where I await Mount Baker’s frozen specter careening over Discovery Bay. The lamps of Port Townsend blink; strands of fog hang over fields. Peckish deer nibble dandelions. I spare my lawn for their graze. The squirrels, miniature and rust-bellied, easily reach the hanging bird seed. I don’t try to learn bird calls, they come to feed and that’s enough. There are rumors of big cats. I’ve seen two elk— one stared through me as if she knew my secrets, the other, roadkill. You once told me my poems are too grim and I should try my hand at something more pastoral. I’ve seen powdered snow on cedars, and I’ve grown passably fond of rain. Every day, the clouds amaze.
Read a review of slight faith by Barbara Lloyd McMichael in Coast Weekly.
"Ice Would Suffice" from slight faith was featured on Verse Daily.
"I Write in the House of Her Narrative" from slight faith was featured on Autumn Sky Poetry.
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Poem from slight faith
Abiding Winter
How we made it through another winter’s not the question. Nor is it an answer since one of us was left behind in winter. In Spring, in buoyancy, you asked a question. Cups stood their ground between us, tea and coffee. You wished to be the answer to your question. Then winter comes again and yet another, a darkling season full of melancholy. The yanking of my soul back to the gutter, that other place where questions have no answers, and answers only placate. It takes rafters of steadfast faith, or mettle, to seek answers. Truth is brutal. So much we can’t recover, years I’ve begged for you to wait for Spring to bloom again, living in despair beside each other, and another stormy season while we tussle for an answer or a coda to the sum of all of life’s bother. I’ve learned to hold my tongue, to question nothing. Questions are another sort of winter.