Asking - Alice Derry

" Asking is what our entire country is doing-asking how to bear up under the loss of so many, these absences of our dearly beloveds. These poems answer by more than memory-by joining the beloved to the present in a way that makes asking itself an answer. An exceptional mind is at work here, lyrically, and with suppositional insistence, making a framework in poetry to approach and reapproach the death and the love-its successes and daily quandaries, its deep companioning-this is what really makes this book sing."

-Tess Gallagher, author of Is, Is Not

"What can you do with grief? How can you fill a loss so deep it takes your breath? These poems make of grief a companion, a teacher, a voice. The emptiness the beloved left behind here fills with necessary beauties and essential consolations. In poem after poem, the world testifies for the lost, offers scant remedies-just enough. And oh yes, I must leave a copy of this book for my own dear ones, after. It will provide them."

-Kim Stafford, author of Singer Come from Afar