Description
Book SynopsisOffering a series of poems rooted in the profoundly narrative yet disorienting experience of losing a loved one, Prageeta Sharma, in
Grief Sequence, summons all of her resources in order to attempt any semblance, poetic or otherwise, of clear sense in trauma. In doing so she shows that grief, frustrating to logic and yet as real as any experience we might know, is ripe for the sort of intellectual and emotional processing of which poetry is most capable.
Trade Review"It is clear that Sharma’s thick use of language explores the craft of poetry and what it does to the crafter, the poet. . . . Think of each poem as a wish, a possibility, or another way that could have been."—Janice Sapigao, Jacket2
"Sharma asks pressing questions about what is contained in the poetic ‘I,’ exploring where it transgresses and where it capitulates to expectation. Proceeding with a lyric, analytical, and oblique relationship to personal narrative, the poems enact the graceful ambivalence of Sharma’s statement that 'to find a salvageable concept/ in the word experience,/ we must embrace how it’s milky, how it’s unformed always.'"—Publishers Weekly
"Subtle and sharp as the needle capturing the starts and shifts of an imagination attentive to beauty and struggle, Sharma’s poems are never gloomy and always gleam."—The Volta,
"Staying alive and moving to its rhythms is a fine definition of Sharma’s poetry. I finished her book feeling lucky to be reading in an age when the technology is in place and Prageeta Sharma deft enough with it to produce this volume of truly charming, truly interesting poems."—Verse Magazine
"How does a poet memorialize her beloved without erasing his complexity? Sharma writes candidly of the elegized’s personality — 'your death was as sudden as your rage' — and of her unanswered anxieties: 'Did he tell the doctor he didn't love me anymore and that's why I wasn't allowed into those conversations?' In doing so, Sharma complicates her narrative away from sentimentality and into reality-fracturing emotionality."—
The New York TimesTable of ContentsContents
ON SECLUSION AND LOOKING OUT
COMPLICATED SPIRITUAL GRIEF, PART 1
COMPLICATED SPIRITUAL GRIEF, PART 2
A HUMAN WITH FEELINGS
UNDER CLOUDS
SEVENTIES LITE & FOURTEEN JOYS & FOURTEEN FURIES
NOVEMBER 23, 2014
SEQUENCES
SEQUENCE 1
SEQUENCE 2
SEQUENCE 5
SEQUENCE 6
SEQUENCE 7
SEQUENCES WITH TITLES
PETTY SEQUENCES
BETWEEN SIGHS
MY POEM FOR MY STEPDAUGHTER
MY POEM ABOUT LAST SOUNDS
RETURNING TO OUR CREATION MYTH
MY POEM ABOUT FALSE FRIENDS
SETS OF THINGS
I LOOK AT YOUR HANDWRITING
MY SENSORIAL PROSE POEM
MOURNING
MY NATURE POEM
MY POEM ABOUT NEW FRIENDSHIP
GLACIER NATIONAL PARK
GLACIER NATIONAL PARK & THE ELEGY
DREAMING WITHOUT KNOWING
MY POEM IN A POETRY HOLE WITH YOU
I COME SO TOGETHER WHERE YOU ARE
ABIDE
YOU LACK FALSEHOOD
MARCH WIND
YOUR HARD SURFACE LAYER
HERMETIC
SEATTLE SUN
THE FUNNY OPPOSITE
POETRY OBITUARY & NOTES
THE MOON HAS SET: POETRY OBITUARY
LESS MUSIC: NOTES ON POEMS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
