First published 2017
Anne Michaels writes from the space between memory and grief, where a speaker grapples with love that death has severed. These poems move through the physical reality of two bodies once joined, now separated by the ultimate divide. The speaker recalls moments of intimacy, the white bed they shared, the fog that surrounded their world together. Each poem examines what remains when passion meets its end through death rather than abandonment. Michaels writes with spare precision about how love shelters us and how loss shatters that shelter. The collection moves between the vastness of connection and the intimate details of what lovers' bodies remember. Death takes one partner before the other, leaving the survivor to navigate what love makes possible and what it cannot overcome. The poems insist that death must give something back, not only take away. Memory becomes the doorway where the living might keep love alive.
Genres: literary-fiction, contemporary, adult-fiction, poetry, 21st-century
Vibes: emotional, intimate, lyrical, thought-provoking
Tropes: grief, loss
96 pages · Hardcover · Knopf
Content warnings: death