The Hoarder (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798899903557)

The Hoarder is a series of prose poems, telling the story of a sixteen-year-old boy's attempt to sift through the fallout of an older woman's hoarding issues over the course of one summer. It is told from the perspective of the boy, Ben Godfrey, as well as the older woman, Maggie Harper. Ben lives in a college town and has been hired to help clean out Maggie's house and barn. While rifling through this mess, he is also grappling with the fact that he is falling in love with his best friend and trying to navigate through the teenage world of hormones, hard work, and uncertainty. Maggie's house and property, meanwhile, have been deteriorating just as her life has been crumbling around her. When he was just sixteen himself, Sammy, Maggie's son, committed suicide. As a result, her marriage with her husband, Walter, falls apart, and Maggie is left alone to collect memories, heartache, and, most of all, junk. Maggie and Ben learn a lot from their shared experience, and though nothing can really change a person or a place, they find some peace and solace in each other, as questions to some of life's biggest mysteries begin to come into focus.