Grief Sequence

by Prageeta Sharma

Overview

Offering 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781950268221
Publisher:	Wave Books
Publication date:	07/21/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	104
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Prageeta Sharma is the author of the poetry collections Grief Sequence (Wave Books, 2019), Undergloom (Fence Books, 2013), Infamous Landscapes (Fence Books, 2007), The Opening Question (Fence Books, 2004), which won the 2004 Fence Modern Poets Prize, and Bliss to Fill (Subpress, 2000). She is the founder of the conference Thinking Its Presence: Race, Creative Writing, Literary Studies and Art. A recipient of the 2010 Howard Foundation Award, she has taught at the University of Montana and now teaches at Pomona College.

Read an Excerpt

MARCH WIND

I think it’s a secret sequence blistering in early spring,
found by the patch of snow melting.

We walk by its shine because it’s a moon of sorts and we
hold our smiles large together. At that moment, I have an
insatiable cheer but within an hour it falls into itself like
a blanket. It’s because if I feel a small change in character,
a betrayal by you, even in teasing, I will summon him in
to help me out of the present. I become morbid with this
because I sense him entering the room—and I can’t have
you both here—and then I anger at you, because I am
ushering him in now, and it feels like a secret I can’t share
with you; and yet he’s so far from me. I am now with you
in a little, tiny house. I have a much smaller life in some
ways and with less shame than previously. Then I sit with
this force of thinking and it turns into an intimacy I can
fabricate into significant claims, full of kindness for you,
which I have found because if I learn to see it only as
hidden from view I manage to get there eventually.

I learn that there are two winters and two early springs
happening at the same time and I have to turn one season
to the other to get past their painful awakenings. It’s just
a snow patch. It’s still melting.

Table of Contents

Contents

 

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

Editorial Reviews

"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

From the Publisher