Still Falling
Poems
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A searching new collection by a poet who “pays exquisite attention to everything she encounters” (The Washington Post)
Still Falling expands on Jennifer Grotz’s precise sense of craft and voice to investigate new territory in this astonishing collection. These poems are emotionally raw and introspective, exploring the profound capaciousness of grief. Grotz carefully and deftly carries the weight of losses and their aftermaths—the deaths of the poet’s mentors, friends, and mother; the endings of relationships; and the enclosures of a life spent in attendance to the world in a state of wanting rather than truly living. Here also are poems that movingly and crucially decide what dedicating one’s life to poetry might require.
But in the wake of painful loss, Grotz writes toward “this world, the living.” Her poems reveal and meditate on the paradoxical relationship between the literal and the figurative, at the heart of poetry itself, like the darkness and light of Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro. Still Falling is a book to be read slowly, calling readers back into the stillness of being, finding hope, “not death / where darkness and silence and dust are / only darkness and silence and dust.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"I don't know/ how we keep living in a world/ that never explains why," Grotz (Window Left Open) writes in her ruminative and beautifully crafted fourth collection. Navigating love, grief, and the various losses one faces in a life, Grotz considers how "The mind won't stop minding" as she delves into the intricate and intimate parts of the attentive self that witnesses "the stillness, the windless calm" and the "heartbreak indigo." The poet finds solace even in the midst of confusion or the aftermath of loss. "A walk is a poem," Grotz offers, "So is a grief." Elsewhere, she writes beautifully on being depressed, asserting "I wasn't indifferent, I was sinking./ I stared at nothing and heard my voice say,// just wait a little longer. I didn't know/ which was me—the urging or the sinking." "Earth's the right place for love," she declares at the end of "In Sicily." Bestowing many moving and lyrical insights, this deserves to be read slowly and compassionately.
