All the Room I Need

In All the Room I Need, Micky Shorr writes from the far side of a long life: Gerde's Folk City and the buses down to D.C., a pregnancy in Venice Beach, a son she raised without trying "to be a dad," cancer, late love, and a grandson who asks why she has so many plants. These are poems that refuse to be told what counts as a fit subject. When a man at an open mic says that family isn't poetry, she answers with a book of it. Unsentimental about suffering—"I did with cancer what I learned as a child. / Waited, endured, remained."—and unembarrassed by tenderness, Shorr claims her place as elder, mother, grandmother, and witness, and insists that the memories be carried. The collection moves in four parts, from "I like to believe my life is true" to "You will be needed to carry the memories." Along the way there is the sensual candour of "Bodylove," the grief of "Ghosts," a five-year-old's questions in "Figuring It Out," and the refusal in "Crone Superpower": Don't call me feisty. Don't assume elder means small or weak. Micky Shorr is a retired school social worker and psychotherapist who lived in the Hudson Valley, New York, for several decades and is now back in Brooklyn. Her poems have appeared in Chronogram, Poetrybay, Trailer Park Quarterly, Pulse: Voices from the Heart of Medicine, and The Ekphrastic Review, among others. She is the author of My Concern: A Poetic Memoir: Poems About Trauma (Write Where We Belong Press, 2025).