L.A. filmmaker Simeon Hutner, director of "Saints and Martyrs" and former MacDowell colonist has a new book out, Life With Sam, available thru SPD. Here's a description of the book from SPD:

Elizabeth Hutner, who herself died of breast cancer in 2002, wrote this tremendously moving series of poems about the death of her son Sam from cancer, while Simeon Hutner (Sam's uncle) took the facing-page photographs. "As I read this book over and over again, the tears welling in my eyes answered for me: yes, here is a life and a poetry that does matter....Hutner's large-hearted work joins her not only with the greatest parent-elegists of lost sons--Ben Jonson, Ralph Waldo Emerson--but also with a poetics older even than Horace....Reading these poems, whose rhythms pound as hotly and audibly as the emaciated boy's heart against his mother's ear, whose memorable rhymes are like watermarks of tears on every page, we are returned to the purest, most elemental beginnings of poetry"-- From the Foreword by Rafael Campo.

I heard Simeon speak on and read from this body of work and cried. Putting in my order now...!