I’ve never
wanted anything
except for someone
to understand
I actually want
many things (“Kneeling in
our name”)
One could mention Krestova, British Columbia writer, educator and mentor Leesa Dean’s recent Interstitial (Sackville NB: Gaspereau Press, 2026) [see my review of such here], a collection surrounding the loss of her own mother, another collection that also wove through elements of addition. There’s also Los Angeles, California poet and translator Youna Kwak’s For This and Other Cruelties (Iowa City IA: University of Iowa Press, 2025) [see my review of such here], writing through the loss of her mother. Around grief, more generally, one could mention other recent poetry titles, including: Jessica Bebenek’s No One Knows Us There: Poems (Toronto ON: Book*hug Press, 2025) [see my review of such here], a collection shaped around the loss of the author’s grandmother; Denver, Colorado poet and editor Andrea Rexilius’ Sister Urn (Portland OR: Sidebrow Books, 2019) [see my review of such here], writing through and around the death of her sister; Memphis-based poet Emily Skaja’s Black Lake: poems (Graywolf Press, 2026) [see my review of such here], a book-length suite that works through the spectrum of grief through the loss of a child; and New England poet Susan Howe’s That This (New York NY: New Directions, 2010) [see my review of such here], writing through the unexpected death of her husband. The only way out, as each of these authors understood, simultaneously the most difficult and straightforward way, is through. “When you catch my eye in dreams,” Clayton writes, to close the two-page poem “Encasement,” “I cannot remember you warm in my hand.”
Through the poems of the lake-shaped excuse, Clayton writes both their grief and their mother across short poems and longer sequence-stretches, writing into and through grief, loss and addiction in waves: an accumulation of lines and moments and lyric fragments of grief that build, swell and recede. “I already have / every memory of / you I ever will.” writes the opening of the six-poem sequence, “Perennial.” The details and heft of such immediacy has moments that occasionally overwhelm, albeit held by a lyric that sustains, provides and allow. To follow an idea, one might say, follow it completely, and here Clayton has done exactly that, a lyric grief without hesitation. The poems loop, swirl, into each other. Set with opening poem “Day of rest” and three sections—“Kneeling,” “Floating” and “Standing”—each of which hold their own title echo, the first section of which is entirely that the sequence “Kneeling in our name,” a way of anchoring each section into the moment of the larger sequence of grief. “Every day / like a sermon,” that opening poem-section reads, “I kneel / to stretch my neck // Like a prayer to / something [.]” The poems loop, echo, play off each other in a kind of layering, providing interlinkages across what might seem like distances. Repeated lines, repeated phrases. The sequence “Floating in our name,” set in the second section, is one that holds a structural echo, perhaps, of Phyllis Webb’s infamous Naked Poems (1965), composing scant lines set in open space. The tension between such emotional clarity and earnest rawness with precise lyric is palpable, writing and writing out and into and through. Or, as that same poem, “Encasement,” begins:
Because you were given to me when I wanted you gone, I felt I owned you.
Because I saw a concrete box enter a furnace but never your body, I owned what was left of it.
Because I wish for your body, and regret that wish, your body becomes both wish and regret.
Because I never saw your body, I own it and your falling.
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