Our Lady of the Bus Stop, by Courtney Mandryk

Poetry, chapbook, 32 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

Our Lady of the Bus Stop braids the domestic with the metaphysical, examining the terrain of new motherhood, stepmotherhood, prayer, and despair. These poems are intimate, image-rich, and associative, moving fluidly between conversation and revelation, between aspiration and its fracturing.

With plainspoken intimacy and metaphorical leaps, the poems–like beads of a necklace, or like the many stops on a bus route–chronicle one bus stop, which is both a literal and spiritual location where the speaker encounters strangers, poverty, violence, and loneliness. Prayer becomes less a religious practice than a way of paying attention to the human condition–to invent prayer in order to heal what the speaker fears.

The poems elevate domestic objects—milk, basil, bus tickets, shopping carts, jars, blankets, and dog fur—into vessels for larger meditations on mortality and grace. With everyday diction morphing into language that is visual and surreal, the speaker’s world is filled with babies who won’t sleep, teenagers who might disappear, strangers carrying invisible burdens, and ordinary moments that contain spiritual significance. With tenderness, humility, and vulnerability, the collection posits that love persists amid uncertainty, and that acts of attention and imagination could become ways to repair despair.

Courtney Mandryk is a writer and artist with an MFA in Poetry from the University of Michigan (where she received a Hopwood Award) and an MFA in Visual Art from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Her written work has appeared in journals such as the Michigan Quarterly Review, Mudfish, and the Cimarron Review. She lives in Charlottesville, Virginia with her children. (www.courtneymandryk.com)