The Other Side

In The Other Side, Lynne Carol Austin offers readers the opportunity to explore the grief, fear, rage, and hope that accompany one of life's toughest passages. In these poems, "cancer is the puppeteer," and Austin provides works that show the compassion, anger, despair, and deep spiritual depths she experiences as the journey unfolds. Readers will be grateful for clear-eyed guidance shown in honest, difficult, and even hopeful moments the writer shares. This is a brave, generous book in which we see the human condition reflected through the lens of a gifted poet.

-Susan Martell Huebner, author, Reality Changes With the Willy Nilly Wind, Gathering Sticks for the Fire, and She Thought the Door Was Locked



Lynne Carol Austin's poetry is deeply introspective and unflinchingly honest. She writes with great sensitivity of her conflicted feelings of sorrow, anger, doubt, and love as wife and caregiver of someone dependent on her presence and support. The opening poem asks the question at the very heart of the type of passage all of us experience, for one reason or another, during our lives:

"How do we get to the other side

what will it look like

when we get there, and

will we both survive"

-Myles Hopper, author, My Father's Shadow



Reading Lynne Carol Austin's The Other Side, we enter the world of cancer. Written as Austin's husband is first diagnosed, we witness lives turned upside down. We watch as roles fluctuate from wife to caregiver with no regard to when or how. Pain, fatigue, anger, and tiny pieces of joy become up close and real. She asks us "Is happiness always a guarded pursuit?" And yet, in the last lines of the last poem, we are reminded, "Understand a little light can seep under a door". In The Other Side, poems do open the door, find the light, and teach us to be more than just observers...even if only to share the journey.

-Maryann Hurtt, author, Once Upon a Tar Creek: Mining for Voices and River, retired RN