This book started out as a narrative of the visits I shared with my mother the last fourteen months of her life when she was a resident at the Helen Porter Healthcare and Rehabilitation Center dementia unit in Middlebury, Vermont. As I prepared the manuscript it occurred to me that perhaps earlier poems I had written about her and her family and my early relationship with her would be illuminating for the reader as well. Taken together, these poems shed light on the changes that took place within her personality as well as the changes that took place in our relationship.

Here are comments about the book from some folks who read the manuscript.

This is a beautiful book and in the most honest and helpful way it can be.  It is for all those who have every dealt with the painful ambiguities of losing a parent through dementia.  These poems tell a story that is hair-raising and heart-lifting at the very same time, funny and sad and deeply evocative.  I found it impossible to put down.
    Reeve Lindbergh 

Conversations at the Nursing Home… transfixed me. It explores the complex relationships between mother and daughter in language deceptively straightforward and disarmingly beautiful. Filled with so much understated wisdom, it is that rare work of art to be read and reread.
    Ray Hudson, author of Moments Rightly Placed: An Aleutian Memoir

This book gives a great personal perspective on the stages of this devastating disease from that of the patient, family and the professional caregiver. It should be read by everyone attempting to understand Alzheimer’s disease and its far reaching effects from a very real and unique vantage point.
    Neil Gruber, Nursing Home Administrator

Deanna Shapiro’s Conversations at the Nursing Home… is a collection of exceptional power that evokes the feelings of deep anguish in a daughter trying to anchor a robust will to love in the sea of her mother’s resignation. It is a book for anyone who wants an authentic look into the human condition.
    Gerard Brooker, author of Even Whispers Can be Heard

'We absorb our mothers,/their virtues and shame,/their intentions and unintentions,’ Deanna Shapiro says of her ambivalent relationship with an ‘unhappy’ mother—that ‘unrealized life.’ These are the poems of a survivor: poignant and powerful, luminous and uplifting—always honest and impeccably crafted. In many conversations, the poet-daughter has transformed memories of sorrow into moments of unillusioned joy. A stunning debut.
    Nancy Means Wright, poet and novelist

Conversations at the Nursing Home… offers readers the opportunity to glimpse reality as experienced by the person with dementia. It demands that we recognize the individual as a sum of their life’s experiences and render care in a manner which makes this reality the best possible. It should be required reading for professional caregivers.
    Nancy Schaedel, Dementia Special Care Unit
              Admission/Program Coordinator

In her book of poems, Conversations in the Nursing Home…, Deanna Shapiro, chronicling her relationship with her mother and her mother’s decisive dementia, asks, ‘How could I get what I needed?...How could she sew us/our necessary clothes?’ These are poems that feel what Shapiro—daughter and poet—saw, heard and felt in those visits to the Home and to her mother, poems that let us enter into loss and what is redeemed by and through it.
   Gary Margolis, author of Fire in the Orchard, Autumn House Press