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My Ordinary Life is a book of story poems, a blend of genres. The heart of the book takes us through the beginnings of the Covid pandemic through the waves of vaccinations and variants to the point where Covid was no longer seen as a deadly threat.

Interwoven are stories of friends who were lost, the pain and fear of isolation, the confusion of the world opening and closing again. Abbott interweaves his own aging, the deaths of both of his parents and the growing awareness and appreciation of the simple gifts of everyday life.

The long pause of Covid allowed him to look more deeply at what would have been transient in his formerly busy life, be that the birds and frogs in his garden, the companionship of his cats, the small interactions with service workers and friends. He explores the intersections of grief and gratitude in a wide variety of situations.

My Ordinary Life is as therapeutic as it is poetic with an affirmation of trauma that begins to allow it to surface and be healed.

"By personal experience, training, and as a practicing therapist for many decades, Franklin Abbott has gained and shared deep insights into human thinking and behavior. In My Ordinary Life, his third book of poems, he has used lucid and lyrical phrasing to apply this valuable awareness to his own life and the lives of many others he's known and loved in recent years. My first reaction on hearing his new title was that this life, even in its simplest daily minutiae, has been anything but ordinary. I'm confident that anyone who learns about it in these pages will agree." - Don Perryman, author of the poetry collection, Hearts Bigger than Brazil

Franklin's writing is anything but ordinary. Like many of the great storytellers, he utilizes everyday occurrences as an opportunity to explore the phenomenon of aging. In this book, Franklin vulnerably shares what happens when life forces us to slow down and sit with ourselves-what materializes when we painstakingly pivot ourselves to just being without the familiarity of always doing. In these poems and stories, Franklin bridges the human experience across literal continents and shifting states of mind, centering how we embody memories, pain, grief, connections and joy. --Dr. Luis R. Alvarez-Hernandez, Professor at Boston University and author of "See Me! Gay and Trans Latinos' Testimonios on Mental Health, Discrimination, and Joy in South Texas"

The first poem that attracted me to the oeuvre of Franklin Abbott's fascinating poetry was a celebration of the ordinary everyday food in India eaten by the rich and the poor. Of course it was born of his Indian connection as he ate the humble Dal, which he says goes far beyond the lentil cooked abroad. He goes onto savour the spices, flavours and aromas that go into it's making. And as one goes through his poems in his latest collection 'My Ordinary Life', one is amazed at his turning the ordinary, which forms much of human existence, in such a reachable yet extraordinary way. Yet another poem that touches one deeply is titled, 'The News is Often Unbearable' as he sits with his friends in his country with his two friends , one from India and one from Pakistan, in the backdrop of 'mass shootings, senseless wars'. Yet the three friends create memory of sitting together and eating their dinner in peace. Such is the soothing balm of the poet from poem to poem in this memorable collection. -Nirupama Dutt author of The Ballad of Bant Singh: A Qissa of Courage

At the peak of the AIDS epidemic, Franklin Abbott created many compelling, memorable poems about love and desire in a time of catastrophe -some of which have lingered close to my heart through the years. His last book, My Ordinary Life, speaks about survival during another pandemic: the one caused by the recent coronavirus. The sense of urgency is here less prevalent, for time has passed and this pandemic carried, evidently, different challenges. A critical question, however, remains: how is it possible to live "ordinarily" throughout devastation, uncertainty, and confinement? In a time of social distance, this book demonstrates that each moment of sanity can become a small victory. In this sense, Franklin Abbott's snippets of "ordinary life" are anything but ordinary: they underscore the value of those things in life we take for granted -and they do so beautifully, with an elegant, unpretentious verse that speak to the reader warmly, like an embrace coming from a time in which we were not allowed to hug others. That is, in the end, the magic of words: they can fill the voids, nourish in times of scarcity. By displaying the poems in alphabetical order, Abbott distorts the idea of time passing -which brings back that sense of stasis many of us experienced during lockdown- and invites the reader to meander through the pages, with the joy that stems from a hopeful heart. - Isaias Fanlo, Professor at University of Cambridge, author of the novel El pes de la boira

Franklin Abbott's 'My Ordinary Life' is a paean to the ordinary life. Written in confessional mode, the poet finds in the ordinary, his own life as well as the lives of others. This is the life of weather, of friends alive and departed, of good food on the table when the news outside wearies you. It is the life of love, and it is as simple as sitting together. This brings acceptance to things, which brings peace. The poet writes about 'growing older/ letting go/ and opening up/about the wisdom of cats/the symphony of nature/ and the mute display of flowers/ in my garden'. Elsewhere, he finds that 'time is the rice/we pour the sauce upon/and sip by sip/ life has coaxed us/to live another day'. These existential ruminations in plainspeak try to find what is often overlooked. While writing elegies for friends, the poet discovers that there is nothing extraordinary about death either, which too comes as a matter of course, leaving the remembered life incandescent. - Amlanjyoti Goswami author of A Different Story

In My Ordinary Life, Franklin Abbott offers readers the reflective rarity of being human-a sojourn marked by cycles of loss and renewal, grief and gratitude, isolation and connection. Through the prism of ordinary days shaped by extraordinary times, Abbott explores glints of humanity that exist in every moment of our own being-whether at the kitchen table, in a pantheon, or the realm between the sea and land. His creations-born of pandemic solitude, the loss of loved ones, and the curve balls of life-reveal the intrinsic spiritual reward woven through our daily existence and enriched through acts of kindness, the sharing of experiences, and the resiliency found in community. Abbott reminds us that even in the shadow of uncertainty, sweet and shining moments persist, and that when carrying grief in one hand and gratitude in the other, the arc of humanity is stretched and capable of finding meaning, comfort, and belonging as the Lachesis of ordinary people who live extraordinary lives. -- Maurice J. Hobson, Ph.D.

Historian, Social Scientist, Africana Studies Scholar, Producer, and Social Justice Champion. Author of The Legend of the Black Mecca: Politics and Class in the Making of Modern Atlanta (2017) and With Faith in God and Heart and Mind: A History of Omega Psi Phi Fraternity (2025).

What an amazing collection this is! It defies genre: memoir, travelogue, meditation, prose and poetry, ode and ballad, lyric and anecdote, all at the same time. A celebration-of-age story. A tribute to people the writer has known, loved, or come across. An elegy to all that was precious, and remains so, now only in memory. Those little incidents of life. The humdrum. The plain, everyday happenings. Encounters, engagements, cares, considerations. Mundane rituals of life. The penance and joys of living. In Franklin Abbott's gentle hands, unadorned and unembellished, they become consecrated, grace and service. The gift of wisdom. Gratis and ungrudging. Exemplary, the economy of these poems. The art of spare, plain expression. The gradations, scale, and spectrum of feelings and emotions it is fine-tuned to convey. Poetry, nonetheless, that seems to come as naturally as the morning breeze. And what could be a higher form of imagination than that which turns the ordinary events of daily life into the most magical experiences? Franklin Abbott's My Ordinary Life launches, in my view, a major new voice in modern American poetry. A collection for the ages. -Waqas Khwaja, Ellen Douglass Leyburn Professor of English Agnes Scott College and author of "Hold Your Breath" and "No One Waits for the Train"

What a gift Franklin Abbott gives us with this new collection! These story-poems talk of life, illness, friendship, food, aging, travel, and death in profoundly honest ways. Shuttling nimbly between the spiritual and the mundane, it is in his word choices and line breaks that Abbott most ably shows us his brilliance as a mature poet (and human being). For those of us who are already fans, we know how his poems have brightened dark roads and lessened the burdens of the last decades. In these perilous times, we need these new verses more than ever. - Cary Alan Johnson, author of Desire Lines

By personal experience, training, and as a practicing therapist for many decades, Franklin Abbott has gained and shared deep insights into human thinking and behavior. In My Ordinary Live, his third book of poems, he has used lucid and lyrical phrasing to apply this valuable awareness to his own life and the lives of many others he's known and loved in recent years. My first reaction on hearing his new title was that this life, even in its simplest daily minutiae, has been anything but ordinary. I'm confident that anyone who learns about it in these pages will agree. - Don Perryman, author of the poetry collection, Hearts Bigger than Brazil

"In My Ordinary Life, Franklin Abbott not only recreates the quotidian but casts contemplative glances backward and forward. Readers will journey alongside the poet as he navigates the loss of both aged parents, his own physical and psychic pain, and dislocations caused by COVID. The gift Abbott shares is his enduring understanding that "in the love of life / is its ache." - Steven Riel, Author of Edgemere

In My Ordinary Life, poet and psychotherapist Franklin Abbott offers a quietly profound meditation on the poignancy of the human condition, told through lyrical story-poems that transform ordinary moments into small altars of insight and revelation.

With a voice both wise and vulnerable, Abbott finds poetry in the fabric of daily life-shared meals with friends, ancestral memories, investigations of aging and loss, late-night reflections, and travels across the globe. His writing is spacious yet intimate, deeply personal yet unmistakably universal. More than a memoir, My Ordinary Life is a tender, unflinching portrait of a life attentively lived. It speaks across generations, and diverse audiences, offering a powerful reminder and inspiration to live life fully, with presence, grace, and open-hearted clarity. -- Harvey L. Schwartz, Ph.D., author of Dialogues with Forgotten Voices and The Alchemy of Wolves and Sheep

My Ordinary Life is full of family and friends, dying and living, mourning and celebrating, eating and drinking - in short - it is full of life. - Alice Teeteris author of Here

Author Franklin Abbott

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