Results by title

170 books match the query 'Death, Grief, Loss' and 9 start with l

cover of Landsickness

Landsickness

Leigh Lucas

Tupelo Press, 2024

A lyric essay about young love and loss and the aftermath of a former lover’s suicide.

Landsickness explores the inelegant progress of grief and pursues a relentless search for evidence of the beloved’s presence through the physics of splashes, the history of seasickness, and the science of depression. While full of tenderness, the poems employ humor and honesty to observe the ugliness of grief and the failure of elegy to restore the dead. 

From the funeral to the office of her dead-end job to navigating the streets of New York, the speaker experiences a series of false starts as she learns to cope with her new life. Still, there is a real sense of progression in the collection’s end, even as the speaker continues to ask herself: “Why am I obsessed with the physics of his fall?"

 
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cover of Late Invocation for Magic

Late Invocation for Magic

Jim Daniels

Michigan State University Press, 2026

In poems selected from his long career, Jim Daniels focuses on Detroit and other Rust Belt cities, where issues of class and race and justice play out in the streets and kitchens and backyards and garages of the Americans trying to live and make a living there. Known for his courage, clarity, and accessibility, Daniels examines the tension between our idealized country and the messier cultural and economic divides, often focusing on those who can’t afford or have access to “magic.”

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cover of Late Self-Portraits

Late Self-Portraits

Mary Morris

Michigan State University Press, 2022

A compelling collection of poems, Late Self-Portraits conveys an intimate description of lives through a collage of portraits and affliction. Weaving history and the sacred, both intimate and worldly, one encounters a blind Jorge Luis Borges with his mother, a glass confessional in the of Notre Dame Cathedral, Frida Kahlo in Mexico, ghosts, a neurosurgeon’s prognosis, and Marie Laveau in New Orleans. Whether in a field with Joan of Arc, encountering the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, or having dinner with Hades, these are haunting poems of loss and unearthing, equally bold, personal, and tender.

From “Dinner with Hades”:

He shows me a birthday cake, candled. My name is written in pomegranate
seeds. It’s like vertigo. Just before he seeks to devour, he halts to birdsong—
sound of goldfinch, bluebird, hawk, lilting of sparrows. Of whippoorwill
and dove. Wings flap, so many wings, a cool breeze as leaves unfurl into a
once forgotten green and I am back on earth, held in my mother’s arms.
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cover of Leap & Grow Feathers

Leap & Grow Feathers

Yona Harvey

Four Way Books, 2026

Both an instruction and a divination, Leap & Grow Feathers is an extraordinary transmission. In her third full-length collection, Yona Harvey listens — to her predecessors, her instincts, and her environment — gleaning sense from the static fraying our nerves, knowing the personal and the historical travel along the same frequency. Responding to the physical disruption and emotional disassociation of of the COVID-19 pandemic, the poet argues that the societal insistence on returning to “business as usual” reflects an institutional, academic, and political ineptitude to provide either physiological healing or social repair, a structural denial that erodes our humanity. As authoritarianism and ecological devastation progressively encroach on our lives, these poems prioritize hoodoo, spirit, intuition, and ancestral conversations in their readings, invoking the carekeeping and persistence of Harriet Tubman, Nikki Giovanni, and the countless forbears, unnamed and named, who traveled the Middle Passage and the Kalunga Crossing. This book channels the power and promise of that legacy as well as the full emotional range of sisterhood, the heartache and borrowed strength and shared laughter. Its humor, whitespace, sparseness, and longform narratives elicit reader participation and, in turn, enduring consideration. "This float. This bob. This drown. This rock. // (This Rock. This Rock.) // This Great Goddamn." What do we find in this vastness, the simultaneity of the ever expanding time that lies ahead and full presence of history consolidating here now? An invitation to join Harvey in her vow: “May I never pretend, / May eye be I.” This collection unveils our vision so we can see it all, not only yesterday’s “Nina Simone lyric / Spun out over a newborn Sunday” in this very moment but also the music unfurling over each incipient morning of the future world we might build together. Leap & Grow Feathers describes and directs: everything we need to survive, to shelter one another, and to protect the Earth lives already in our bodies, our lineages, and our lore. 

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cover of Let It Be Broke

Let It Be Broke

Ed Pavlic

Four Way Books, 2020

The poems in Ed Pavlić’s Let It Be Broke are ignited by sonic memories—from Chaka Khan on the radio to his teenaged daughter singing “Stay” at a local café—that spark a journey into personal and ontological questions. Pavlić’s lyric lines are equal parts introspection and inter-spection, a term he coins for the shared rumination that encourages some collective deep thinking about the arbitrary boundaries that perpetuate racial and geographic segregation and the power of words to transcend those differences. In an epiphanic moment, Pavlić recalls a quote shared by a former teacher as “a hammer made of written words,” and how he held “onto those words / as if they were steel bars and I was dangling over some bright black deepness.”
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cover of Lethal Theater

Lethal Theater

Susannah Nevison

The Ohio State University Press, 2019

Reckons with the rituals of violence that underpin the American prison system, asking readers to consider the act and complications of looking at violence and suffering.

In Lethal Theater, Susannah Nevison offers a stark and lyrical reckoning with the hidden architectures of the American prison system. These poems inhabit the charged territory where medicine and punishment converge, revealing how the body becomes both patient and instrument under state control. Moving through histories of wartime confinement, interrogation, and isolation, Nevison writes a poetry of witness to the carceral state, illuminating what is so often kept from view.

With precision and moral force, Nevison examines the shadows cast by medical experimentation on imprisoned bodies, the blurred boundary between hospital anesthesia and the drugs used in lethal injection protocols, and the rituals of surveillance that shape life behind bars. This is a work rooted in the medical humanities of confinement, an inquiry into how suffering is recorded, observed, and, at times, rendered invisible.

Lethal Theater makes visible the brutal logics beneath state-sanctioned pain and insists on the urgency—and responsibility—of looking closely at what the nation asks its incarcerated to endure.

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cover of Letters from the Black Ark

Letters from the Black Ark

D.S. Marriott

Omnidawn, 2023

Rhythmic lyrical poems that embody black music, existence, and tragedy.

The poems in this collection center on the word “dub,” which accrues a subtle lyrical connotation throughout its various forms and meanings—to bestow, vest, crown, and also to suspend, reverb, echo, and sever. Dub poetry plays with revealing and concealing, while also pointing the way to the conditions that produce black poetic music. In D.S. Marriott’s poetry, tragic catastrophes of current black existence—London knife crime, the Windrush scandal, Grenfell, and deadly race violence—are portrayed as questions of language. To speak this language, as Marriott’s poem show, is to take on the forces that cause rupture. Throughout these poems of loss, exile, and obliteration, the poet foresees his downfall and metamorphosis, ultimately realizing too late that he cannot transcend the reverberations and echoes laden with black social death.
 
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cover of Levee

Levee

Paul Otremba

Four Way Books, 2019

The poems in Paul Otremba’s Levee explore the intersection between the ecological, the political, and the personal in a world built on oil and greed. The city of Houston is at once backdrop and metaphor for the ways in which violence—both natural and manmade—have become part and parcel of twenty-first century life. “It’s a luxury to be this calm,” Otremba writes in the opening poem, a held-breath between the disastrous effects of hurricanes and cancer. Yet Otremba’s exquisite lines manage to wrest meaning from the devastation wrought by both global warming and a terminal illness: “If there is a lesson / on how not to worry, it’s that you’re not stuck only being one thing, /the multitudes in me and the multitudes in you.”
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cover of Like We Still Speak

Like We Still Speak

Danielle Badra

University of Arkansas Press, 2021

Winner of the 2021 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize

Conversation and memory are at the heart of Danielle Badra’s Like We Still Speak, winner of the 2021 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. In her elegiac and formally inventive debut, Badra carries on talking with the sister and father she has lost, often setting her words alongside theirs and others’ in polyphonic poems that can be read in multiple directions. Badra invites the reader to engage in this communal space where she investigates inheritance, witnessing, intimacy, and survival.
 
“This is a deeply spiritual book, all the more so because of its clarity and humility. Yet, we cannot walk away from the addictive command that so many of these poems ask us to follow: to read them along plural paths whose order changes while their immeasurable spirit remains unbound. Each poem is a singular vessel—of narratives, embodiments that correspond with memories, memories that recollect passion. . . . Like We Still Speak is a sanctum. Inside it, we are enthralled by beauty, consoled by light, sustained by making.”
—Fady Joudah and Hayan Charara, from the Preface
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