The Hands of Strangers: Poems from the Nursing Home (American Poets Continuum Book 130)

The Hands of Strangers portrays the tensions and moments of grace between aged nursing home residents and their healthcare workers.

As people live longer, we face the challenges that come with caring for, and living as, an aging population. This collection focuses on the sad, funny, mundane reality of life in a nursing home. In her own words, Janice N. Harrington worked her way through college as a nurses' aide and wrote The Hands of Strangers because she "cannot forget the 'girls' I worked with or the 'residents' under my care. I haven't forgotten what I saw, heard, felt, or learned."

Janic N. Harrington's debut Even the Hollow My Body Made is Gone earned teh 2007 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize, and an NEA fellowship for poetry.

As people live longer, we face the challenges that come with caring for, and living as, an aging population. This collection focuses on the sad, funny, mundane reality of life in a nursing home. In her own words, Janice N. Harrington worked her way through college as a nurses' aide and wrote The Hands of Strangers because she "cannot forget the 'girls' I worked with or the 'residents' under my care. I haven't forgotten what I saw, heard, felt, or learned." Janic N. Harrington 's debut Even the Hollow My Body Made is Gone earned teh 2007 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize, and an NEA fellowship for poetry. An astonishing moving second book of poetry, a celebration of both sides of a relationship that has rarely if ever been do deeply examined. She achieves a delicate balance between the fragile lives of nursing home residents and the difficult tasks performed by the hardworking strangers who care for them. -- back cover