The Grief We're Given

by William Bortz

Overview

Readers call William's poetry "breath-taking", "refreshing" and "relatable to anyone".

The Grief We’re Given explores the collective and personal experience of grief and grieving through themes and tropes such as relationships, love, loss, nature, eternity, and hope as a thinning, but exuberant, door. How are we to learn to grieve when it feels unrelenting? How are we to adore and memorialize small moments of appreciation? How are we to shape our grief into something worth celebrating, and begin to understand the grief we give?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781771682190
Publisher:	Central Avenue Publishing
Publication date:	02/02/2021
Pages:	144
Sales rank:	635,067
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

William Bortz (he/him) is a husband, poet, and editor from Des Moines, IA. His poems appear in Okay Donkey, Oxidant Engine, Empty Mirror, honey & lime, Turnpike Magazine, Back Patio Press, the Lyrical Iowa Anthology, and others. He is the author of Shards and the chapbook The Sky Grew Back with Clouds. Growing up, William spent time in foster care, in homelessness, and in shelters. His aim in writing is to explore how joy lives in uncertainty and mourning.

Editorial Reviews

01/18/2021

The innovative debut from Bortz considers the relationship between anxiety and solitude, the body and grief. While unified by shared thematic concerns, these poems traverse a wide range of forms, including lyric fragments, elegies, litanies, and erasures. Bortz’s strength is his fearless experimentation, which allows for a series of surprising formal shifts, illustrated by his definition of “Language—/ an unwrinkling of plagues.” Several poems are gracefully aphoristic, as in “Hope, Breaking, Knowing,” which remarks that “a wish is the bone, fractured/ asking to be mended/ hope is the bone/ never learning/ it can be broken.” Elsewhere, the speaker defines freedom as “choosing where to bury/ beneath what grass/ facing which cardinal direction/ toward which home/ recognizing the body/ having the body/ having the body to bury.” This sort of careful amplification is common throughout the collection, which, though occasionally veering into abstraction, never loses sight of its quiet cataloging of pain. Bortz delivers a subtle portrait of violence and endurance, and an intriguing work that places varied experimental forms in dialogue with one another. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

With their quiet intensity and graceful questioning, these verses will pull you inside yourself and out into mysterious communal joy.”—Christine Jewel, author of Fading Through

“A luminous and consistently breathtaking exploration of grief, Bortz’s stunningly crafted writing will stay with you long after its final exhale.”—Blake Auden, author of Murmuration

“The imagery is tangible; the metaphors are breathtaking. The depth of this collection makes it one worth reading again and again.”—Davis John Patton, singer/songwriter

From the Publisher