Getting Sober: A Practical Guide to Making it Through the First 30 Days is a clear and accessible handbook through every step of the early weeks of sobriety, brimming with expert guidance designed to smooth the rough edges. Learn how to prepare for sobriety, find professional treatment, and manage cravings. A special focus on handling unexpected emotions, and avoiding situations that may trigger a desire to drink, are lifesavers to the person at the beginning stages of recovery. New concepts are introduced that can be put to work immediately to increase the chances of success, including Banned from Your Hand, and Triggerlocks.
All of the common concerns of those in early sobriety are thoroughly and respectfully addressed, from demystifying A.A., to unwinding without a drink. Discover how to use the Internet as a recovery tool, and how to differentiate between true support and drinking buddies. Find out why nothing seems fun when you quit drinking, and what to do about it. Learn how to restore your spirit, and how to begin to heal the damage that your drinking has done to your personal relationships. Finally, get an honest picture of what the future might look like.
Kelly’s decades of working closely with people as they get sober are reflected in the solid practicality of her many suggestions. Getting Sober: A Practical Guide to Making it Through the First 30 Days does not ramble on about whether alcoholism is a disease or what causes it; instead it says if you want to quit drinking, do these things. Her tone is unfailingly respectful, kind and direct. Whether doing this at home, or with the help of treatment services, these are the simple techniques that work, spelled out in detail. This book is what every person suffering from a drinking problem needs at that moment when they become ready for help.
Get Help Now
This web site cannot be a substitute for medical advice. If you need help now, contact your physician. Or open your phone book to Alcoholics Anonymous, call the number, and ask the person on the other end of the phone for help.
If you are experiencing withdrawal symptoms, go directly to the closest hospital emergency room. Withdrawal from alcohol is not only uncomfortable, it can cause deadly seizures. Medicine can help you through it, so seek medical help if you are experiencing withdrawal symptoms such as shakes, sweatiness, sleeplessness, or nausea.
Do you want to find a treatment center? The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s Center for Substance Abuse Treatment (CSAT) provides a toll-free, 24-hour treatment referral service to help you locate treatment options near you. For a referral to a treatment center or support group in your area, call: 1-800-662-4357
Support is also available online. Try these web sites:
Alcoholics Anonymous
Substance Abuse Treatment Facility Locator
The Edge of Known Things is a declaration of reverence, a communication from a nontraditional prophet attempting to both explore and adore the world. What some flinch away from is held up for examination in these poems, poked at with a stick, as the narrator seeks to understand the line between what is already understood and what is hidden. Returning often to the issue of memory—what we know, what we think we recall, what actually happened, what was dreamed, imagined or pretended—the poems rotate on deep images in an attempt to separate comprehension from mystery. –from the publisher’s catalog
The core poems in this collection were written during the time-outside-of-time experience provided by Jentel, an artist residency program in rural Wyoming. One of the fellow residents was working in a studio in sight of my cabin window, and every day she’d set paintings and collages out in the sun, against the building. Her work became an evolving part of the landscape for the month we were there together. One of those paintings serves as a cover image for this collection, which is so much about the mysterious interconnectedness that we know and then don’t know and then try to know again. -Kelly
For Kelly Madigan, attention is a kind of prayer. “This is my work,” she tells us, “the watching.” Her poems are keenly observed, always focused on the particulars of the moment, and yet she acknowledges that to be human is to be haunted by “the intrusion / of recollection.” Madigan takes us to the edge between now & then, here & there, the recalled & the imagined, and invites us to walk that thin line – eyes open in wonder.
—Grace Bauer, author of Retreats & Recognition and Beholding Eye
The Edge of Known Things is strewn with the names and bodies (some living, some dead or soon to be) of animals: possums, badgers, porcupine, mule deer, sea otters, leverets, coyotes, humans. Kelly Madigan is one of those rare poets who remember to attend first to the natural world, the mysteries of the quotidian beyond metropolitan and suburban America. She sees life and even beauty where others might notice only horror and decay: in the decomposing body of a badger: “white worms, / furiously climbing over one another.” When encountering a porcupine, most of us would see only its unforgiving armor, but Madigan reminds us that for an hour after birth even the porcupine is “benign and pliable.”
—Jeremy Halinen, author of What Other Choice