You Carry the Heavy Stuff contains essays and poetry regarding: desolation in an office cubicle, internal/external adventures through life, as well as illness, recovery, job search, writing workshops and life as a twin.
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By Steve Pulley
Oct 13, 2011
"You Carry the Heavy Stuff" is chock-full of charming, witty, thoughtful, heart-wrenching, pithy, provocative, soul-stirring, eye-opening, tragic, hilarious, wow! essays, poems, and anecdotes on life from someone who has lived it all. I can only say that I will gladly read anything Esther Bradley-DeTally writes, including her shopping list, because she is a superlative writer who writes with soul, mind, and heart—in her own way, on her own terms. Awesome stuff. I highly recommend "You Carry the Heavy Stuff" to everybody.
Esther Bradley-Detally makes “carrying the heavy stuff” pure delight, a safari of the mind, a Himalayan trek for the soul. Make no mistake, the stuff you are asked to carry is heavy, no frothy meringue in this book - a woman toiling and chaffing at a mindless job, a return late in life to the university and her love of literature, relationships run amok, the pain of sitting by a hospice bedside watching her twin sister die. But the weight is lifted by a lightness of being, by insights and humor to mend the heart and maybe even mankind of his endless pillaging. A few chubby pug dogs add lightness too. Esther’s sorcery is in the words, images that startle us, mixing the mundane with sublime: Caldwell cows with “haiku coats” grazing outside her dying sister’s window, death the color of a rainbow, like “riding the Ferris Wheel higher than ever before.” When you read this gem of a book, take along a large empty suitcase for all the “stuff” you will want to collect and carry back home to... More > use daily. Don’t worry about packing hope on top. It’s unbreakable. Kathryn Jordan, author of the novels, Hot Water (Berkley/Penguin 2006) and Gladys And Capone (2008).< Less
