We are thrilled to announce the winner of this year’s Leaves of Life Chapbook Contest: Totality by Julia Paul.
This powerful collection of poems confronts one of life’s most profound tragedies—the death of a child—through a lens of clarity, vulnerability, and raw honesty. Totality invites readers into an emotional landscape that is both heart-wrenching and beautifully rendered.
The collection as described by contest judge Kathleen Hellen masterfully bookends the experience with “vivid imagery of a red leaf—one that is swept away by the wind, a poignant metaphor for loss, and another that clings tenaciously to the “fragile weavings” of a spider’s web,” symbolizing the delicate nature of grief and memory.
In a world where such topics are often shrouded in silence, Totality breaks through with a voice that resonates with authenticity and depth. The poems challenge us to confront our own experiences with loss, while also offering solace and understanding to those navigating similar journeys.
We extend our warmest congratulations to Julia Paul for this significant achievement and look forward to sharing more of her work with you. Totality will soon be available for purchase on our Fallen Tree publications website. We encourage you to experience this fervent collection for yourself.
Thank you for your continued support of our literary community.
It is gut-wrenching to talk about the death of a child, and harder still to write about it with clarity and brutal honesty. The poems in Totality do just that. The collection begins and ends with images of a red leaf, one pulled away by the wind, subject to the forces of nature, and the other clinging to the “fragile weavings” of a spider’s web. These images memorialize the experience of a mother whose life and that of her son have been eclipsed by an alien cancer. They frame the context for poems that make ready for death, detailing the “geometry” of pills and the “Green waves of nausea after chemo,” and chronicling how “He curls into a comma / on the couch” or “When you pull over so he can vomit.” The grief is punctuated with memories of a “Hell Boy poster/ with torn corner” and the anatomy of his tattoos: “letters etched on the knuckles / in his brother’s handwriting / spelling out H-O-L-D H-O-P-E.” The author gives us a vocabulary to talk about absence. She names it “Bradley,” the 25-year-old son who is the “shooting star,” “luminous in the dark,” in the “new empty” where she “travel[s] to the edge of his last breath.”
Kathleen Hellen, Leaves of Life Contest Judge, author of Meet Me at the Bottom and The Only Country Was the Color of My Skin
