Our Aching Bones, Our Breaking Hearts: Poems on Aging Savishinsky Joel

We confront our own aging long before we ourselves become old. Drawing on the author's half-century career in gerontology and anthropology, the poems of Our Aching Bones, Our Breaking Hearts explore the physical, emotional, and spiritual impact of the aging experience on the nurses and patients, parents and grandparents, retirees and volunteers, Holocaust survivors and roommates, and elderly spouses and mourners he has known.The poet shares stories in a variety of settings, which include a summer camp, an orchard, a national park, a nursery and a nursing home, hospitals, an older couple's marital bed, and the steps of a small-town front porch. Through the roles we play as family, friends, or caregivers to our elders, we learn to anticipate our own later years.

At the core of these stories stand the aging body and mind, the well-worn heart,