Books
Books of memoir, poetry, and essays
In 1982, twenty-five-year-old Angie Boggs, pregnant with her second child, was brutally murdered, along with her husband and infant son. Ill equipped for the horror of that violence and the enormity of her loss, Angie’s sister Ona, a college sophomore, felt numb. She also felt deeply ashamed of her inability to grieve.
But shame, like her sister’s absence, was something Ona knew well. For as long as she could remember, she’d felt ashamed of being their parents’ blatantly favored child. The disabled daughter they’d coddled and protected while they alternately punished and neglected Angie, and finally sent her away.
It wasn’t until thirty years after the murders, both their parents gone and Ona nearly twice the age Angie was allowed to reach, that she developed the courage and a detective’s compulsion to learn all she could about her sister’s turbulent life and unthinkable death. The result is Everywhere I Look, a beautifully rendered memoir of sisterhood, longing, true crime, and family secrets. A profoundly moving reckoning and love letter.
Everywhere I Look
Memoir | 2024
Present Imperfect
Essays | 2021
“Ona Gritz has a poet’s sensibility that permeates everything she writes. The essays in this collection are filled with small moments of epiphany that make a reader stop mid-sentence to savor. “You’re teaching me who I am,” the author whispers to her son in one essay—but as she shares these personal moments, she’s the one teaching us.” —Andrea J. Buchanan
“In this brilliantly moving book, Ona Gritz reminds us that storms—physical and emotional—and their aftermaths can lead to a searing devotion to the truths of who we are. From hurricanes to karate classes, family tragedies, and the challenges of disabilities, these essays move by delicate suggestion, by the shadows a resonating image casts, by language both tough and musical, precise and evocative. Reading this collection, we feel the exhilaration of what it means to be fully alive.” —Barbara Hurd
“Reading Ona Gritz’s essays feels like spending a crystalline afternoon with a witty, honest, profound, and deeply kind friend. These 14 intimate pieces explore family, friendship, disability, loss—and above all, profound love.” —Dawn Raffel
Welcome to the Resistance
Poetry as Protest | 2021
“I received this poetry collection as a gift. I opened the book and read so many of its rich and engaging poems that I was afraid I would finish the book in two days. I left the book on the table near where I study so I could read the poems more slowly and be cheered by its encouraging title each time I walked by. The poems, immensely varied in form and voice, are passionate, sustaining, and necessary. This is an eloquent collection beautifully curated for all who are working for the equity, justice, and peace which all the people of the world deserve.” —Hope DeRogatis
Border Songs
A Conversation in Poems | 2017
“The poems in Border Songs offer more than a conversation between poets: they’re conversant, knowledgeable, informed by eros, loss, delight, curiosity, and intimate wisdom. This collection stays long after you’ve stopped reading to meditate alone about body and soul.” —Stephen Kuusisto
“Love’s not easy. Belonging is even harder. And true poetry’s more difficult, I swear, than love and belonging combined. The speakers in these poems have cultivated a rich patience, have, separately, established sonorous, intelligent lives full of tenderness and nuance and passed them along to us in an embrace. One tells us, “…the trees / turned into notebooks so the story could change.” The other: “I’m just getting to love / this world for what it is, a flawed place / with its subway platforms overlooking the third rail . . . .” And change and love is what this book is about, risk and quiet transformation, a deeper change than drama. That these voices, against the odds, have found one another is a sort of miracle, that they are harmonious and comforting speaks volumes of our larger humanity and of our singular loves. True poems. Reading this book is “like hearing music in a cathedral.” —–Renée Ashley
Geode
Poems | 2014
“Ona Gritz’s poems prove the unlikely–that it’s possible to dazzle with simplicity, an eloquent, apparently effortless simplicity that poem after poem registers emotional truths. Many poems in Geode explore what it means to live gracefully with a disability. I don’t know if Gritz has perfect pitch, but she has its poetic equivalent; she continually hits the right note, and moves us to a different sense of regard by her precisions and her exquisite sensibility. I love this book.” —Stephen Dunn
“Ona Gritz writes her life in a sequence of beautifully observed and crafted moments, with superb control, not a line out of line. Disabled yet unsparing of herself, she claims her kin. But her emotional depth, her honesty, and the clarity of her voice will reach every reader — she’s akin to us all. This is a fine collection.” —Hettie Jones
“When a geode is cracked open, it has rugged edges and sparkles. Life is like this, but these poems are perfectly shaped. They are dense and clear as glass. Although not “jagged,” they take risks — with intimacy, and risks with forms, veering in and out of concise lines and conversational moments. They break open to allow breath and double meanings; they imply rough-edged “stories,” but they feel smooth. They reflect the poet’s sensuous experience of being with her blind lover, of the joy in being heard, and in listening. These poems hold their pieces of “geode” in honor, and raise all parts of daily living to the light.” —Madeline Tiger
On the Whole
A Story of Mothering and Disability | 2014
Ona Gritz has had cerebral palsy all her life, but until she gave birth to her son, she didn’t really understand what it meant to be disabled. Her cerebral palsy affects her coordination and balance but not enough to have ever truly hindered her. “For the most part, I considered my disability a cosmetic issue,” she tells us in On the Whole. “Just how obvious is it? Do people see me as pretty despite the limp?” But now she’s got a new baby to care for, and no one has warned her what a physical job she has taken on. She can’t bathe her son by herself or carry him up or down a flight of stairs. Nor can she feed herself or even open a refrigerator with a baby in her arms. And her baby will settle for nothing less than being in her arms. With lyricism and candor, poet Ona Gritz shares her son’s first years with us, a time when she wanted nothing more than what all of us want—to be the perfect mother, only her imperfections kept getting in the way.
“Ona Gritz’ short memoir about how new motherhood put her face to face with her own physical limitations reads like poetry. This should be required reading for all new moms, those living with a disability, or those who simply need a healthy dose of inspiration to get through hump day.” —Paige Bennett
More Challenges for the Delusional
Peter Murphy’s Prompts and the Writing They Inspired | 2018
More Challenges for the Delusional, edited by Ona Gritz and Daniel Simpson, is a craft book based on prompts and exercises for generating writing developed by Peter Murphy in his role as a writing teacher. This long-anticipated follow-up to “Challenges for the Delusional” brings us a wealth of Peter Murphy’s writing prompts, and an anthology of creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. In this edition, you will encounter a diverse range of emerging and accomplished writers including Kim Addonizio, Tony Hoagland, Dorianne Laux, Mimi Schwartz, and Pulitzer Prize winner Stephen Dunn. The prompts will ignite your creativity, daring you to take risks and produce work that is sometimes strange but always thought-provoking. This book will offer something new each time you return to it.
Left Standing
New Women's Voices Series, No. 32 | 2004
“This series of visceral, poignant poems has the force of a sudden storm and the intensity of that storm’s relief. In Left Standing, Ona Gritz taps into a passionate current of feeling that pulses from child to parent and back again. Brilliant in craft, naked and direct in expression, each poem moves us forward with yet another truth until we are left standing in the cleared air of candor, ready — as the poet is — to begin life renewed.” —Molly Peacock
“The death of one’s parents often gives rise to the birth of one’s self. This is certainly true in the case of Ona Gritz’s poetic voice that emerges out of and is limned by these twin primal deaths. In lines characterized by their emotional restraint, linguistic terseness, and humility, Left Standing left me moved by the power of the unsaid that hovers ghostlike around the said, as Gritz’s memories of her parents haunt these evocative poems of self-discovery.” —Sharon Dolin
“Ona Gritz’s response to the death of parents is deft and generally understated, and as a result her little book of narrative poems has the impact of a much larger work. With gentleness, humor and forgiveness, she explores her parents’ rocky marriage and her place in it. In the end she can lay her angry parents side by side in a heaven where Dad reads a blank newspaper, Mom writes home on an Elvis postcard and God gives a great back rub. Strong, accessible poems–certainly a good first book!” —Lois Marie Harrod