My Ordinary Life is a book of story poems, a blend of genres. The heart of the book takes us through the beginnings of the Covid pandemic through the waves of vaccinations and variants to the point where Covid was no longer seen as a deadly threat. Interwoven are stories of friends who were lost, the pain and fear of isolation, the confusion of the world opening and closing again. Abbott interweaves his own aging, the deaths of both of his parents and the growing awareness and appreciation of the simple gifts of everyday life. The long pause of Covid allowed him to look more deeply at what would have been transient in his formerly busy life, be that the birds and frogs in his garden, the companionship of his cats, the small interactions with service workers and friends. He explores the intersections of grief and gratitude in a wide variety of situations. My Ordinary Life is as therapeutic as it is poetic with an affirmation of trauma that begins to allow it to surface and be healed. "By personal experience, training, and as a practicing therapist for many decades, Franklin Abbott has gained and shared deep insights into human thinking and behavior. In My Ordinary Life , his third book of poems, he has used lucid and lyrical phrasing to apply this valuable awareness to his own life and the lives of many others he's known and loved in recent years. My first reaction on hearing his new title was that this life, even in its simplest daily minutiae, has been anything but ordinary. I'm confident that anyone who learns about it in these pages will agree." - Don Perryman, author of the poetry collection, Hearts Bigger than Brazil In An Ordinary Life , Franklin Abbott not only recreates the quotidian but casts contemplative glances backward and forward. Readers will journey alongside the poet as he navigates the loss of two aged parents, his own physical and psychic pain, and dislocations caused by COVID. The gift Abbott shares is his enduring understanding that "in the love of life / is its ache." -Steven Riel, author of Edgemere ★★★★★ What an amazing collection this is! It defies genre: memoir, travelogue, meditation, prose and poetry, ode and ballad, lyric and anecdote, all at the same time. A celebration-of-age story. A tribute to people the writer has known, loved, or come across. An elegy to all that was precious, and remains so, now only in memory. Those little incidents of life. The humdrum. The plain, everyday happenings. Encounters, engagements, cares, considerations. Mundane rituals of life. The penance and joys of living. In Franklin Abbott's gentle hands, unadorned and unembellished, they become consecrated, grace and service. The gift of wisdom. Gratis and ungrudging. Exemplary, the economy of these poems. The art of spare, plain expression. The gradations, scale, and spectrum of feelings and emotions it is fine-tuned to convey. Poetry, nonetheless, that seems to come as naturally as the morning breeze. And what could be a higher form of imagination than that which turns the ordinary events of daily life into the most magical experiences? Franklin Abbott's My Ordinary Life launches, in my view, a major new voice in modern American poetry. A collection for the ages. -Waqas Khwaja, Ellen Douglass Leyburn, Professor of English Agnes Scott College and author of Hold Your Breath and No One Waits for the Train ★★★★★ Franklin's writing is anything but ordinary. Like many of the great storytellers, he utilizes everyday occurrences as an opportunity to explore the phenomenon of aging. In this book, Franklin vulnerably shares what happens when life forces us to slow down and sit with ourselves—what materializes when we painstakingly pivot ourselves to just being without the familiarity of always doing. In these poems and stories, Franklin bridges the human experience across literal continents and shifting states of mind, centering how we embody memories, pain, grief, connections and joy. -Dr. Luis R. Alvarez-Hernandez, Professor at Boston University and author of See Me! Gay and Trans Latinos' Testimonios on Mental Health, Discrimination, and Joy in South Texas ★★★★★ At the peak of the AIDS epidemic, Franklin Abbott created many compelling, memorable poems about love and desire in a time of catastrophe —some of which have lingered close to my heart through the years. His last book, My Ordinary Life, speaks about survival during another pandemic: the one caused by the recent coronavirus. The sense of urgency is here less prevalent, for time has passed and this pandemic carried, evidently, different challenges. A critical question, however, remains: how is it possible to live "ordinarily" throughout devastation, uncertainty, and confinement? In a time of social distance, this book demonstrates that each moment of sanity can become a small victory. In this sense, Franklin Abbot's snippets of "ordinary life" are anything but ordinary: they underscore the value of those things in life we take for granted —