170 books match the query 'Death, Grief, Loss' and 5 start with g

cover of Greater Ghost

Greater Ghost

Christian J. Collier

Four Way Books, 2024

In Christian Collier’s debut poetry collection, Greater Ghost, this extraordinary Black Southern poet precisely stitches the sutures of grief and gratitude together over our wounds. These pages move between elegies for private hauntings and public ones, the visceral bereavement of a miscarriage alongside the murder of a family member, and the specter of police brutality. With a profound awareness of literary tradition, Collier enters into the American canon and dialogues with Black Southern noir—a poem like “Beloved,” whose title expresses not only a genuine tenderness in its term of endearment but invokes Morrison, contextualizes this book within the legacy of racial injustice in the U.S., presenting again the prolific losses and disproportionate Black mortality across time, and yet remembers the resilience of love and transformative possibility of self-actualization from inside tragedy. 
 
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cover of Green Island

Green Island

Liz Countryman

Tupelo Press, 2024

Poems that enlarge our sense of what beauty and awe can be.

The poems in Green Island delve into the relationship between place and imagination, examining the ways in which the physical places the speaker occupies, remembers, and imagines determine and enlarge her understanding of self.

While operating with startling self-awareness, Green Island does not simply offer poems that interrogate the circumstances of their own making. The work found in this slim volume questions the poetic tropes of beauty and romantic love and their relationships to the lyric. Ultimately working within the confines of a received tradition to expand what is possible within it, Liz Countryman shows us moments of quiet revelation in the quotidian, the comic, and in the vestiges of popular culture.

 
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cover of Grief for the Green That Was

Grief for the Green That Was

Jacob Shores-Argüello

University of Arizona Press, 2026

Moving tenderly across memory, continents, and literary forms, Jacob Shores-Argüello’s tightly woven cross-genre collection evolves a private family bereavement into an exploration of collective ecological grief. Following the death of his mother, the speaker navigates between his Costa Rican heritage and his Oklahoma upbringing, eventually arriving at something like healing on the banks of New Zealand’s Whanganui River—the first river in the world granted legal personhood. 

Structured around a Spanish nursery rhyme, Grief for the Green That Was finds solace in the prospect of citizenship for a more-than-human world, a possibility it approaches through perspectival shifts and innovative forms—including footnoted poems, hybrid fiction, and an experimental choose-your-own-adventure sequence—that overturn lyric and storytelling conventions. 

A book about what we inherit and what we leave behind, both in families and in landscapes, Grief for the Green That Was examines how climate change affects not just the physical world but also our emotional and spiritual relationships to place. Here Shores-Argüello creates a new language for twenty-first-century grief that refuses to separate the personal from the planetary.

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cover of godhouse

godhouse

Ruth Ellen Kocher

Omnidawn, 2023

Poems that consider the human body as a meeting place of the infinite and the mortal.
 
Starting with the idea that the human experience is the universe looking back at itself, godhouse takes the notion a few steps further by centering cosmology within a raced and gendered body. Ruth Ellen Kocher’s poems envision this body as a union of god and soul that, within our material world, encompasses love and hate, joy and despair. The body is a site of divine presence made mortal, electrified with the resonance of both the infinite and the human. In godhouse, we encounter the body as a site where the universe is made personal and celebratory, where the celestial endure the complications of flesh and friction forms between the glorious and the monstrous aspects of personhood.
 
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cover of god’s breath hovering across the waters

god’s breath hovering across the waters

Henry Israeli

Four Way Books, 2016

god’s breath hovering across the waters begins with the story of Arthur Penzias’s discovery of the echo of the big bang through a cryogenic microwave receiver and from there explodes into a meditation on the author’s mother’s untimely and tragic death. Memories, history, war, science, horror movies, space exploration, and the RCA dog are just some of the subjects that expand and contract, intersect and repel, throughout the arc of the collection. Praise for previous books: “Such lovely doubts in these poems….These rescues are almost always simply human—a couple making love, a child drawing—as the edge here, the dread, is so humanly complex. This is simultaneously a raw and restrained book. Israeli doesn't spew or explain but remains open to the need so consistently embodied in these poems.” —Bob Hicok “Israeli is visceral and brilliant, intransigent in his doubts. His poems lead deeper into the wilderness—toward the human, the ambivalent, the paradox Dorothy Day called ‘a hard and dreadful love.’’   —D. Nurkse
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