It's A Blessing Not To Be Alone

With Ferocity And Extraordinary Craft, Lizzie Harris Has Made A Book Of Poems That Resonates Far Beyond The Personal Stories It Tells. Stop Wanting Reveals, In Every Lyric, Its Author's Profound Metaphorical Gifts. In Its Ironies And Intensities, It Brings To Mind A Writer Like The Young Sylvia Plath, Though What Is Startling About Harris' S Work Is The Way It Combines Those Gifts With A Muted, Deft Self-awareness. Most Of All, These Are Wonderfully Shaped, Powerful, And Surprising Poems-a Startling Debut.

Faith Does Help Mourners Survive Their Loss, Some Studies Suggest; But I Imagine One Still Struggles.

I Wasn't Prepared For The Fact That Grief Is So Unpredictable. It Wasn't Just Sadness, And It Wasn't Linear. Somehow I'd Thought That The First Days Would Be The Worst And Then It Would Get Steadily Better - Like Getting Over The Flu. That's Not How It Was.

My Whole Life, I Had Been Taught To Read And Study, To Seek Understanding In Knowledge Of History, Of Cultures.

Yet The Story Of Orpheus, It Occurs To Me, Is Not Just About The Desire Of The Living To Resuscitate The Dead But About The Ways In Which The Dead Drag Us Along Into Their Shadowy Realm Because We Cannot Let Them Go. So We Follow Them Into The Underworld, Descending, Descending, Until One Day We Turn And Make Our Way Back.