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Sheryl St. Germain’s Fifty Miles is an honest, whole-hearted exploration of addiction and its aftermath, a study of grief, hope, survival, and the cruel reality of failure. While St. Germain’s son Gray did not live to tell his own story, she manages here to tell it with care, compassion, and profound insight. Beautifully-written, deeply-felt, Fifty Miles is the story of so many of us who’ve fought addiction or suffered alongside loved ones caught in the net.

— Dinty W. Moore, Between Panic & Desire

These heart-breaking, candid and beautifully crafted essays reach beyond the death of a child. They examine the difficult work of surviving the aftermath. What St. Germain offers is not just her story, but the broader wisdom of distilling grief’s many voices. In so doing, she remains an artist of the highest order.

— Barbara Hurd, Tidal Rhythms and Listening to the Savage

In the era of photoshop and Facebook, we’re never been more in need of an honest and vulnerable writer like Sheryl St. Germain. With a poet’s ear, a critic’s insight, and a mother’s fierceness, she investigates the life of her troubled son and her efforts to heal after his death. This is a necessary book for anyone who hopes to understand addiction, grief, healing, or the human heart.

— Beth Ann Fennelly, Poet Laureate of Mississippi, author of Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs

This isn’t a book about failed relationships, or loss, or grief, or addiction, or parenting. It is much more than that. To give it a label is to strip away the beauty of it—how these essays dissect and interweave and meditate on the emotional complexities of being part of a world that constantly breaks our hearts. It is about love, yes, and guilt, yes, and pain, yes, and memory that clings and holds and haunts. Sheryl St. Germain has created worlds within these pages—some in the unreal plains of a video game, some in the fraught vulnerabilities of motherhood—where she unspools a life cut short and how to reconcile and forgive and remember.

— Ira Sukrungruang, Buddha’s Dog & other Meditations

A book to break your heart, then mend it again. In 50 Miles, poet and memoirist Sheryl St. Germain narrates in finely-wrought essays a story of a multi-generational family beset by problems with addiction that, far too often, proved fatal. Empathetic and brave in her reporting, St. Germain recounts a delicate daisy-chain story of sobriety and survival. Whether trekking in Alaska, hiking in Wyoming, studying glaciers and swamps, or traversing the Amazon, this author seeks understanding. She is the one who crochets the world back together in interlocking loops of yarn and enters gaming environments as a night elf healer avatar to aid fallen warriors—all intentional acts that suggest ways to cultivate healing and resilience. In 50 Miles, Sheryl St. Germain illuminates a phosphorescent pathway out of the dark cave of devastation and grief, back into sunlight.

— Debra Marquart, The Horizontal World: Growing Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere