Mama's Blues

Chicago poet Albert DeGenova brings his formidable strengths as a writer and jazz saxophonist to Mama's Blues, a chronicle of his mother's losing battle with Alzheimer's disease. The familiar emotions-love, grief, confusion, denial-are here, filtered through the unique DeGenova sensibility that transcends the cliches and cuts right to the heart. For anyone who has loved and lost a parent, particularly one who has suffered through dementia, this collection will bring insight, connection, and perhaps a degree of solace.

-P. Hertel, co-editor of After Hours: A Journal of Chicago Writing and Art



The poems of Mama's Blues by Albert DeGenova ache with love, tenderness and remembrance when one's first love's own memory is fading. With direct language and poignant imagery, DeGenova offers up poems as songs to match his mother's hymnal voice. If the blues are indeed passed down from mother to son, then it's a good inheritance, a good inheritance. This book is a gift like a drink of water for a thirsty reader.

-Jacob Saenz, author of Throwing the Crown



Albert DeGenova's Mama's Blues is an ever-ripening suite of laments, heartfelt and musical. His poems remind us that mortality, memory, and passing time are sweet tricksters. They flimflam us into believing we see our mothers diminishing, disappearing, yet through these poems we understand a mother's legacy is always latent and forever unplumbed.

-Kathleen Driskell, author of Blue Etiquette