The Details Will Be Gone Soon is a close investigation of the primordial underpinnings behind Alzheimer’s disease and the emotional wreckage left in its wake. This poetry collection follows the speaker and his grandmother, Nana, and the various memories shared between the two. At times, the collection seeks to illustrate the loose word associations, frustrations, and existential cloud cover that darkens dementia’s horizons. Other poems steer toward youth and hope, extolling love, lessons learned, and shared experiences. This dichotomy allows the collection to successfully walk that critical line that families of Alzheimer’s patients often experience: one that straddles between the unfairly diminished, barely-present caricature versus the vibrant, vigor-filled past-selves that close friends and family spent a lifetime loving.

$18

In clear and moving poems, Jeremy Jusek’s The Details Will Be Gone Soon chronicles the loss of his grandmother to Alzheimer’s.  The poems record the beloved acts, objects, and memories connecting the narrator and grandmother—a quilt with roses, a lesson in making soup, a love of books. “A book to her/was a lighthouse/piercing society’s fog,” writes Jusek. The poems also explore the toll taken on the family:  frustration, anger, and sorrow, and the acknowledgement of mortality.  This is a very poignant story and a book with a worthy purpose: All proceeds from the book will be donated to the Alzheimer’s Association.  

 – Lynn Emanuel, author of The Nerve of It: Poems New and Selected (Winner of 2016 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize) and Noose and Hook 

 

Parma Poet Laureate Jeremy Jusek’s The Details Will Be Gone Soon is an honest, well-crafted, poignant, and extraordinarily moving account of his experience navigating his grandmother’s Alzheimer’s journey. Without a doubt, it is the best poetry collection on this topic that I have come across and I highly recommend it.
– John Burroughs, U.S. Beat Poet Laureate 2022-23 and author of The Wrest of the Worthwhile 

 

Poet Jeremy Jusek is privy to a secret we hope you don’t learn for yourself. Dementia erases not only the memory of those so afflicted, but also that of the ones who love them. We forget who they were. The Details Will Be Gone Soon is testimony against that forgetting. By turns a deceptively straightforward accounting of a life and a demise, and a portrait more akin to the impressionist and surrealist works the poet’s Nana loved, which “makes the third-person more personable/ and terrifying horrors artistic.” The poems are spoken both in the voice of grandmother and grandson and are a weaving together of past and present, of what is given and what is lost. “This woman taught me nuance,” the poet writes, and she taught him well. 

 – Pauletta Hansel, author of Palindrome (Weatherford Award, 2017); Cincinnati’s first Poet Laureate, 2016-2018