Intro -- Contents -- Loss Waits on the Porch -- The Child and I -- Everyone Is Afraid of Something -- I Stopped Drinking in Hopes Loss Would Stop, Too -- Daddy Tosses Them Down -- Loss Received a Letter Once -- The Avalanche -- You Have Ruined Us for the Pragmatic World -- Two Sisters in Their Gabardine Skirts -- My Mother's Lips -- How Her Words Entered Me When She Called to Say My Father Had Died at Last after Ten Months of Pain -- After the Stroke -- Loss Touched Death Once -- All I Know for Certain -- It Is Said That Wigmakers -- The Gaudy Clothes of Tourists -- This Morning -- Loss Dreams He Hears Sobbing -- Dying from the Feet Up -- Loss Calls the Cops -- When He Told Her -- Why She Plants Lavender -- Your Beautiful Hands -- She Told Me the Dead Woman's Husband Had Been Running Around for Years -- The Train Whistle -- Arranging a Life -- Poem Beginning with a Line from Walker Percy -- Loss Says He's Moving to the Beach -- Events -- Loss Considers the Idea of Bliss -- You Can't Write Off the Dead -- To Lose Something -- Briefly, I Was Asleep -- The Stepping-Stone Kit -- I Took My Mother Shopping -- I Knew a Boy -- The Best I Can Do For Her -- Why I Miss Visiting My Mother-in-Law in Helena, Arkansas -- The Villa -- I Want to Write a Poem I'd Be TooEmbarrassed to Read to My Monday NightPoetry Group -- The Dual Nature of Grief -- Loss Hungers for Something -- A Place Airy and Fraught.

With a quirky poignance, Dannye Romine Powell's third collection probes the nature of loss-loss that's actual and loss that's feared. In these poems, loss takes many guises. With its ferny breath, loss is sometimes the lover who waits in secret on the porch. Sometimes even loss recognizes the feeling of loss and "calls the cops / to say his best friend / went fishing and won't answer his phone." Often, the poet mourns a loss of innocence, as when she learns, after attending the funeral of a friend, that the dead woman's husband has a history of infidelity. There's also the loss of romantic love, as when the woman "pulls / toward shore, a shore she calls by a name / she swore she'd never breathe again.".

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Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2018. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.