Click Here to Buy: Pretend Ballads by Edward McCrorie:
On September 11, 2001, I was having dental work done in Providence, Rhode Island, when news of the attacks came through. My wife, Beatrice Beebe, was at work in New York City only a few miles from the World Trade Center. When we reunited later that week, we knew our lives were changing, and I encouraged her idea to help in Manhattan somehow, since she was well experienced aiding mothers with young children.
The poems, prose and pictures in this book are a culmination of many discussions, readings, clinical help and sundry emotions over the past twelve years. But I did not realize there might be poetry here until December, 2012, when Beatrice and her associates published her and their major work: Mothers, Infants and Young Children of September 11, 2001, A Primary Prevention Project, edited by Beatrice Beebe, Phyllis Cohen, K. Mark Sossin and Sara Markese; . New York: Routledge, 2012.
I found both frightful and hopeful memories of my own childhood returning. Over and over the children’s play, stories created in a lab room and intended to act as a kind of therapy, astonished me for their variety, anger, mourning, and especially their imagination. After six months I had about sixty poems on my hands, the rough draft of a book.