Review: The Birth Of A Widow by Kathie Giorgio

Synopsis:

The Birth of a Widow is an utterly shattering portrait of the sudden loss of a husband and a shared life that will speak to anyone who has ever loved or lost a loved one. In these poems of electric honesty, Giorgio explores how she struggles to survive her first year as a widow, using all her wisdom, humor, anger, to cross the vast sea of grief to the other shore, bringing us—wiser, too—along with her.

—Jesse Lee Kercheval, author of I Want To Tell You

Sixty-six days after Kathie Giorgio’s husband was killed when he was struck and run over by a passenger van while walking to his bus stop, Kathie’s grief broke out unbidden into poetry. For the year after his death, she wrote the poems as they arrived. An intimate study of traumatic loss, Giorgio exposes the full depth of grief’s sadness, anger, and confusion.

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This collection was somber and raw and hard to read in the most necessary way. You could feel the pain rising up out of every poem. Kathie Giorgio’s loss was tragic and sudden, and we experienced her many stages of grief through this collection in a way that felt deeply intimate and deeply real.

The Story

Sixty-six days after Kathie Giorgio’s husband was killed when he was struck by a passenger van while walking to his bus stop, her grief broke out unbidden into poetry. For the year that followed his death she wrote the poems as they arrived. The Birth of a Widow is the result. An intimate and electric study of traumatic loss, it exposes the full depth of grief’s sadness, anger, and confusion as Giorgio navigates her first year as a widow.

Reading Experience

Reading this collection was incredibly grounding. To relive that experience alongside a widow, from the very moment she became one, through her own words, was something I did not expect to feel so immediate and so present. There was no distance between the reader and the grief. You were in it with her.

What Giorgio does so remarkably well is write with such raw emotion that readers are allowed to fully see and feel her vulnerability as she processed her loss. There is no performance here, no polished distance. Just the honest, aching work of a person trying to survive something unsurvivable and putting it into language as it happened.

Characters

This is a poetry collection rooted in real life and real loss, so rather than characters there are presences. The husband whose absence shapes every page. The widow finding out who she is without him. And grief itself, which moves through this collection like a living thing with its own moods and its own rhythms.

Heartbeat

The heartbeat of this collection is the truth that no moment is ever guaranteed. Loss comes in unexpected ways and at unexpected times and we can be thrust into grief forced to figure out what this new life will be without the person we held dear. Giorgio does not soften that truth. She sits inside it and she writes from inside it and she brings us with her through every stage of it. That honesty is what makes this collection so powerful and so necessary.

Final Thoughts

The Birth of a Widow is recommended for readers who can resonate with the pain and growth of real life. For anyone who has loved deeply or lost suddenly or is somewhere in the middle of that vast sea of grief trying to find the other shore. Kathie Giorgio navigated that crossing and she brought her words with her, and those words will stay with you.

This title is available through WOW Women on Writing. There is also a book giveaway running from June 1 through June 14 at The Muffin at muffin.wow-womenonwriting.com for a chance to win a copy.

Thank you for allowing me to be a part of this virtual book tour WOW Women On Writing.

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It could be said that I’ve written from both sides of grief. First, from my imagination. And now, from my reality. 

In 2017, my novel, In Grace’s Time, was released. The main character, Grace, lost her son to an accident during a hide’n’seek game. The inspiration for the novel came from a nightmare. I dreamed that my oldest son, Christopher died. I was standing by his coffin and I was holding Hot Stuff, his stuffed red devil he’d had since the day he was born. I was trying to decide if I should bury Hot Stuff with Christopher, so he could have his best friend for all eternity, or if I should keep Hot Stuff, so I could always have a piece of Christopher with me. I woke, sobbing so hard, I couldn’t breathe or make a sound. I stumbled into Christopher’s room and found him sleeping peacefully, Hot Stuff held in his arms. 

I had no doubt that what I felt that night was the grief that comes with the loss of a child. 

Fast forward to 2026, and my poetry collection, The Birth Of A Widow. I wrote these poems during the first year after my husband Michael’s death. He was struck, and then run over, by a passenger van as he crossed a street in downtown Milwaukee. 

This happened in 2024.  That feeling of crying so hard, I can’t breathe or make a sound, is with me every night, and often during the day. 

I caught the horror of losing someone so beloved with my imagination in 2017. I am living that horror now. 

Writing these books was difficult, but with In Grace’s Time, I could close my laptop and walk away. With The Birth Of A Widow, I closed my laptop after every poem, but I never walked away. I walked with grief beside me, inside me, and outside of me. I still do.

Writing The Birth Of A Widow is the hardest work I’ve ever done, but it was work that demanded to be done. The lines came to me without prompting. But it was also cathartic. I couldn’t control the experience or my grief. But I could control the words and have a sense that there was some order. I could write The End. 

Michael has been gone for almost two years. The grief is still there, sometimes loud, other times a soft hum. But I feel I can bring justice for my husband. The driver who hit Michael was not tested for drugs or alcohol. He was only given a citation for failure to yield to a pedestrian. With my book, I am able to talk about Michael and the unfairness to others. His death is not stuffed into a file and put into archives. I will not let anyone forget. 

I look now with wonder at both books. One imagined, one lived. 

Both have helped me.

Kathie Giorgio is the author of seventeen traditionally published books: eight novels, two story collections, an essay collection, and five poetry collections. Her new novel, Unique In All The World, will be released in February 2027. She’s been nominated for the Pushcart Prize in fiction and poetry and awarded the Outstanding Achievement Award from the Wisconsin Library Association and the Eric Hoffer prize for fiction, among others. 

Giorgio is also the founder and director of AllWriters’ Workplace &Workshop LLC, an international creative writing studio offering online and on-site courses and workshops for all genres and abilities, as well as coaching and editing services.

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