My Ordinary Life

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