Four Seasons, Year of Our Awakening

Steven Harris was learning first words and had been walking for three weeks when his babysitter violently shook him. The doctors did not think he would live. He did. His book of poems tells the story of a beautiful, powerful mind within a body that so far cannot respond. Steven, like countless others who live alone amidst families or institutions, had no outlet for an extraordinary intelligence that is every child's birthright and that can develop profoundly in children who seem helpless due to brain damage. But Steve and his father Jim learned to communicate with a simple card that contained the alphabet. Eventually he was picking out individual letters and spelling words, wishes, his feelings. This collection of 74 poems relives the year that followed, what both Jim and Steve call "our year of awakening." The poems are gifts of a mind at play, at discovery, they express the transformation poetry has brought to the lives of Steve and his family. This boy has realized his power for giving, for healing.