Seeing The Body

"This is a searing elegy for a mother who died after years of illness that held her family in its thrall. With astonishing frankness and detail, Griffiths anticipates, experiences, reexperiences and works to meaningfully incorporate her mother’s memory and death into the everyday fabric of life. This grief goes far beyond the mourner’s typical self-questioning (“Could I have ever saved her?”) into more complex realms of inheritance: “I remember/ her voice like a thorn I never want/ to pull out of my heart.” It’s one of the most empathic and transcendent books of poetry in years."