"Pema Rocker's poetic prose is balm to the soul of those carrying unhealed wounds.
In Ash and Spirit she advises you to acknowledge grief and listen for spirit, writing, 'It's all here for us,' and she's right: It's all here for you in this haunting, healing book."
-Suzanne Giesmann, author of Messages of Hope and Still Right Here
Praise for Ash and Spirit
“…beautiful and hard and honest and needed.”
“…reading this feels like being loved with ferocity and tenderness.”
“Is it possible for a piece of writing to be achingly painful and simultaneously luscious?
I think I just read the answer.”
A Story to Heal and Feel Grief Together
When 30-year-old Pema, one of New York City’s newest residents, ran to the corner to see
“how they put out fires in big cities,” she had no way to know she and the people stopped in
the street around her were witnessing the start of a national attack, or that the sight would
retrigger the painful trauma of her brother’s sudden death when they were teenagers.
Neither did she know it would begin an emotional and spiritual journey that tested and
transcended physical bounds.
Ash and Spirit travels a story of loss as a teenager, and the search to resolve decades of grief. A
narrative collage constructed of interviews, messaging chats, journal entries, pictures, and
personal stories that take place over thirty years, Ash and Spirit, represents the dislocated
nature of memory and trauma recall. Vivid and detailed moments in time stitch together to tell
a whole story of many losses into one for the sake of healing individual and collective grief.
Told from the tender center of both personal loss and collective, this book will be valuable for
anyone experiencing loss or grief, for the first time or still.
ABOUT PEMA
Pema Rocker is a writer and community media organizer. She has created, curated and edited magazines for LGBTQIA/Queer and spiritual communities, created story circles for groups who want to connect on a deeper level, and helped people find their ways through grief and transition that crops up in the stories they write, from business media to teaching curricula to songwriting to memoir. Pema lives in Portland, Oregon. This is her first book, but not her first rodeo.