In Orphans of the Real, Marilyn Charles shares poems that combine fragments of self-experience into an integrated mosaic of loss and memory. Chronicling her own journey of self-exploration through psychoanalysis, Charles offers up to the reader a kaleidoscope of affect-laden images that, together, reveal the landscape of a grieving process that carries forward the fragments of past and present into a newly envisioned future. These poems invite the reader into their own journey of transforming loss into a more vitalized remembrance that both holds the sacredness of suffering and also transcends it. This book will be of particular interest to those intrigued by psychoanalysis and its possibilities.