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Reliquaria
Winner, 2013 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry
In his prize-winning poetry collection Reliquaria, R. A. Villanueva embraces liminal spaces in considering an ever-evolving Filipino American identity. Languages and cultures collide; mythologies and faiths echo and resound. Part haunting, part prayer, part prophecy, these poems resonate with the voices of the dead and those who remember them. In this remarkable book, we enter the vessel of memory, the vessel of the body. The dead act as witness, the living as chimera, and we learn that whatever the state of the body, this much rings true: every ode is an elegy; each elegy is always an ode.
In his prize-winning poetry collection Reliquaria, R. A. Villanueva embraces liminal spaces in considering an ever-evolving Filipino American identity. Languages and cultures collide; mythologies and faiths echo and resound. Part haunting, part prayer, part prophecy, these poems resonate with the voices of the dead and those who remember them. In this remarkable book, we enter the vessel of memory, the vessel of the body. The dead act as witness, the living as chimera, and we learn that whatever the state of the body, this much rings true: every ode is an elegy; each elegy is always an ode.
- GenresPoetry
82 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 2014
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About the author
R. A. Villanueva
5 books11 followersR. A. Villanueva is the author of A Holy Dread, winner of the Alice James Award (forthcoming in 2026), and Reliquaria, winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize (U. Nebraska Press, 2014). New work has been featured by the Academy of American Poets and National Public Radio—and his writing appears widely in international publications such as Poetry London and The Poetry Review. His honors include commendations from the Forward Prizes and fellowships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
August 14, 2018
A brilliant and lush collection that feels in and of itself like a reliquary.
December 28, 2025
R. A. Villanueva’s “Reliquaria” arrives with its hands already stained – not in the melodramatic way of a gothic aesthetic, but in the honest way of anyone who has handled the dead, tended the sick, lifted the lid on memory, or stood too close to a ritual that insists it is about holiness when it is also about the body’s blunt facts. This is a book that understands devotion as a kind of pressure: something that compresses language until it shines, or splinters. The poems do not float toward transcendence. They keep bumping up against bone.
A reliquary is supposed to protect what remains. Villanueva is more suspicious, and more accurate, than that. He knows the container never truly contains. The sacred thing leaks. The sacred thing corrupts. The sacred thing persists anyway, stubborn as salt in a wound. “Reliquaria” is animated by that contradiction: it wants to preserve, and it wants to look directly at what preservation costs. If the book is haunted, it is not by misty apparitions but by the ordinary ghosts of family, faith, history, and the body’s own archive – scars, hunger, inherited reflexes, the remembered weight of a parent’s hand at the crown of the head.
From the outset, the collection is fascinated by the overlap between reverence and violation. Its opening gestures put the reader in the vicinity of anatomy theaters and chapels, of saints and cadavers, of the beautiful vocabulary we devise to keep from saying the simplest thing: this is flesh, and it ends. The book’s diction has a particular palate – mineral, medicinal, liturgical, occasionally metallic – but it is never merely a catalog of exquisite nouns. Villanueva’s language has hunger in it. It wants to bite down. Even when the poems are lush, the lushness feels earned by contact with what is ugly or frightening or morally complicated.
That moral complication is one of the collection’s virtues. Villanueva has the nerve – and the restraint – to place tenderness beside cruelty without forcing them into a tidy lesson. A Catholic school dissection becomes an early emblem for this. The scene is grotesque, even comic, and yet the comedy curdles into something like shame: a disciplinary system that treats the body as a problem to be managed, a locus of sin, an object to be corrected. The poems are alert to how institutions make the body speak their language, even as the body insists on its own grammar – reflexes, desire, laughter, refusal.
In “Reliquaria,” fathers and mothers are not symbolic placeholders; they are specific presences, freighted with cultural memory and the ache of translation. Villanueva’s family poems do not sentimentalize the domestic. They do not offer the kitchen as an uncomplicated site of comfort. Instead, the domestic becomes another reliquary – a place where love is stored in food, in small rituals, in the refusal to waste what should be eaten, in the sharpness of a parent’s warning. One of the book’s great achievements is how it treats taste as a moral sense. The mouth becomes an archive. The tongue becomes a witness. What you can swallow, what you cannot, what you are taught to find delicious or disgusting – all of it becomes a record of belonging and estrangement.
The collection’s first movement is especially attentive to formation: how a self is made, especially a masculine self, under pressures that are both intimate and historical. A sequence that borrows its title from the first books of “The Odyssey” reads like an anatomy of inheritance. The father appears not as a sentimental figure of guidance but as a transmitter of vigilance: hair parted and pressed down with pomade, the memory of drills, the sense of the world as a place where catastrophe can sound at any moment. Villanueva is not interested in confession for confession’s sake. He is interested in the mechanisms by which the body learns to brace itself. The poems suggest that what we inherit from our parents is often not narrative but posture.
If Part I of “Reliquaria” often feels like a series of incisions – purposeful cuts that reveal nerve and tendon and the hidden freight of the ordinary – Part II turns toward the slow, exhausting labor that follows injury: caregiving, ritual, farewell. Here the poems are saturated with thresholds. A cemetery becomes a city. A farewell dinner becomes a study in what cannot be consumed. Illness enters not as dramatic plot but as schedule: gauze, pills, the climb up stairs, the embrace that doubles as a crutch. The book’s spiritual vocabulary deepens in these poems, though “spiritual” may be the wrong word for what Villanueva is doing. He is not using belief to lift the material world into metaphor. He is allowing belief to be another material – another substance that can be handled, frayed, burned, and carried.
The epigraphs that open each section function like tuning forks. They set a pitch for the reader’s ear: the sense that endings are present from the beginning; that amazement is not naïveté but an ethical stance; that bodies do not simply die but change into other bodies, other substances, other stories. Villanueva’s work is full of transformations, though they rarely feel like redemption. “Reliquaria” is allergic to the easy consolations that sometimes come attached to religious imagery. The poems can be devotional, but they are not pious. They are more interested in what faith costs than in what it promises. Prayer is a gesture with worn edges. It may be necessary, but it is never guaranteed to work.
One of the most striking aspects of Villanueva’s craft is how he makes erudition feel bodily. References do not arrive as literary name-dropping. They arrive as part of the book’s nervous system. Renaissance anatomy and Catholic relic culture are not remote subjects; they are ways of thinking about what it means to live in a body that will be touched, broken, preserved, forgotten, displayed. When the poems glance toward “De Humani Corporis Fabrica,” the interest is not only in the historical text but in the mindset that wants to name every part. Villanueva is drawn to the desire for mastery, and he keeps showing where mastery fails – where the sacred slips beyond the scalpel, where the human refuses to be fully legible.
That refusal becomes explicit when the book widens into public catastrophe and its aftershocks. A poem that moves through New York after 9/11 does not traffic in spectacle. It is attentive instead to the atmospheres that linger: the way the city asks you to look, the way it asks you to remember, the way memory itself can become a battleground. Villanueva understands that commemoration is not neutral. It can be weaponized, made into a demand, turned into a test of belonging. The poem’s anger is not abstract; it is bodily. It is the memory of threat, of being read as unwanted, of needing to name ghosts in order to survive them.
“Reliquaria” is, among other things, a book about how bodies become objects. A disappeared person becomes a display. A dead relative becomes a story told and retold until it has the varnish of inevitability. An animal becomes the target of a trap justified as domestic necessity. Villanueva is brave enough to enter that justification and show the cruelty inside it. The mouse poem in Part II is chilling not because it depicts violence, but because it depicts how quickly the mind builds a moral architecture to house violence and call it reasonable. The poem does not excuse. It does not flinch. It watches the self become capable of what it did not want to admit it could do.
If Part II is the book’s vigil, Part III is its release – not release into comfort, but into a broader, stranger field of transformation. Here the poems become more overtly mythic and archival. They are concerned with catacombs and specimens, with artworks that preserve the illusion of permanence, with bones that outlast names. They are also concerned with weight – with ballast, gravity, pressure. There is a repeated insistence that humans are not designed for lightness. Even when we dream of ascension, our marrow is full of iron. The poems do not mock that heaviness. They treat it as a kind of truth: a reminder that to be human is to be bound to a world of matter, to be obligated to the ground that will take you back.
A long persona piece set in the descent to the Mariana Trench uses exploration as a metaphor that resists easy uplift. The deep sea becomes an analogue for the limits of perception, for the failure of language at extreme pressure, for the way awe can feel like fear. Villanueva is adept at creating a sense of the sublime without romanticizing it. His sublime is not a mountain vista; it is the recognition that there are depths – literal and moral – that the human body can enter only briefly, and at cost.
The book’s archival imagination comes to a head in poems that contemplate catacombs, museum specimens, and the preservation of bones as cultural objects. Villanueva’s attention here is double. On one hand, he is moved by the stubbornness of what remains: the evidence that someone lived, that a civilization loved and buried and carried its dead. On the other hand, he is wary of the ways preservation can become another form of control – the dead turned into inventory, the sacred turned into exhibit. This tension is integral to “Reliquaria’s” project. It does not want to choose between reverence and critique. It wants to keep both alive, even when they grind against each other.
The book’s mythic and biblical sequences perform another kind of transformation: the transformation of voice. Villanueva speaks through figures whose stories are saturated with violence – Judith, Medusa, Ugolino, Isaac – and he refuses to sanitize them. What emerges is not a set of moral parables but a set of intimate monologues that make the ancient stories feel newly unsettled. The poems are particularly attuned to how violence erases the self, how trauma can turn memory into stone. The Medusa poem is devastating in its insistence that the horror is not only the monstrous body but the loss of the former self, the soft hair, the sweetness, the possibility of being loved outside of fear. Myth becomes a way of talking about what cannot be said straight on: the psychic cost of being turned into an object of someone else’s narrative.
One of the pleasures of “Reliquaria” is its formal variety. Villanueva moves between lyric, sequence, persona, list-like accumulations, and moments that feel almost essayistic in their clarity. His line breaks often create a sense of pressure, as if the poem is trying to keep too much inside it. He uses white space and fragmentation not as fashionable gestures but as structural equivalents of breath, interruption, the mind catching on what it cannot easily cross. The sound work is meticulous. Consonants click and grind. Vowels open and thicken. You can feel the poems in the mouth, as Kimiko Hahn’s blurb in the book’s front matter suggests, but what lingers is not only texture. It is the way texture becomes meaning.
At the same time, the book occasionally risks the danger that attends any highly wrought style: saturation. There are moments when the density of image and reference can feel like a sealed chamber – a reliquary that does not easily open to the reader’s oxygen. This is not a flaw so much as a choice with consequences. Villanueva is writing against the flattened diction that dominates so much contemporary speech, and his resistance is admirable. Yet the reader sometimes has to work through thickets of metaphor and allusion before reaching the poem’s emotional pulse. For some, that labor will be part of the book’s pleasure – the sense of being asked to attend, to slow down, to earn the revelation. For others, it may create a distance, a glass between the hand and the relic.
The emotional temperature of “Reliquaria” is also distinctive. Villanueva is not a poet of easy disclosure. His tenderness often arrives obliquely – through objects, through actions, through the memory of a grandmother’s oxygen mask, through the father’s glance that cannot be sustained. This restraint is one reason the book feels sophisticated: it does not manipulate. It trusts the reader to recognize the emotional stakes without being instructed how to feel. But restraint can also mean that some poems keep their heat behind a veil. The book’s best moments – and there are many – are the ones where the veil thins, where the lyric intensity and the ethical intelligence converge into a clear, unavoidable human presence.
The closing poems function less as finale than as coda, a settling. A piece that turns toward Buddhist story and the idea of being carried into heaven does not declare belief so much as it admits longing. Another poem imagines the rituals of one’s own burial with a kind of controlled tenderness that is both eerie and generous. The final “Memento Mori” returns the book to earth: compost, worms, roots, the body becoming material again. In these endings, Villanueva offers a version of grace that is unsentimental. It is not the grace of escape. It is the grace of recurrence, of being reabsorbed into the world that held you.
If I were to place “Reliquaria” on a simple scale, I’d put it at 87 out of 100, not because it lacks seriousness – it has seriousness in abundance – but because its commitment to density and its cultivated austerity can, at times, narrow the aperture through which the reader can enter. Yet that same commitment is also what makes the book feel durable, not designed for the season’s weather but for longer climates. Villanueva has written a collection that treats language as a sacred instrument without pretending it can fully save what it names. He has written poems that know the body is both altar and evidence. And he has done so with a craft that is not merely impressive, but purposeful – a craft that understands that beauty, if it is to mean anything, must be able to look directly at what it cannot keep.
“Reliquaria” is not a book you finish and forget. It leaves its residue. It asks you to consider what you carry – the rituals you inherited, the foods you refused, the histories that shaped your posture, the prayers that still rise in you even if you do not believe in the listener. It is a book that insists the sacred is not elsewhere. It is here, in the stubborn materials of living – in bone, in breath, in the mouth’s taste for what remains.
A reliquary is supposed to protect what remains. Villanueva is more suspicious, and more accurate, than that. He knows the container never truly contains. The sacred thing leaks. The sacred thing corrupts. The sacred thing persists anyway, stubborn as salt in a wound. “Reliquaria” is animated by that contradiction: it wants to preserve, and it wants to look directly at what preservation costs. If the book is haunted, it is not by misty apparitions but by the ordinary ghosts of family, faith, history, and the body’s own archive – scars, hunger, inherited reflexes, the remembered weight of a parent’s hand at the crown of the head.
From the outset, the collection is fascinated by the overlap between reverence and violation. Its opening gestures put the reader in the vicinity of anatomy theaters and chapels, of saints and cadavers, of the beautiful vocabulary we devise to keep from saying the simplest thing: this is flesh, and it ends. The book’s diction has a particular palate – mineral, medicinal, liturgical, occasionally metallic – but it is never merely a catalog of exquisite nouns. Villanueva’s language has hunger in it. It wants to bite down. Even when the poems are lush, the lushness feels earned by contact with what is ugly or frightening or morally complicated.
That moral complication is one of the collection’s virtues. Villanueva has the nerve – and the restraint – to place tenderness beside cruelty without forcing them into a tidy lesson. A Catholic school dissection becomes an early emblem for this. The scene is grotesque, even comic, and yet the comedy curdles into something like shame: a disciplinary system that treats the body as a problem to be managed, a locus of sin, an object to be corrected. The poems are alert to how institutions make the body speak their language, even as the body insists on its own grammar – reflexes, desire, laughter, refusal.
In “Reliquaria,” fathers and mothers are not symbolic placeholders; they are specific presences, freighted with cultural memory and the ache of translation. Villanueva’s family poems do not sentimentalize the domestic. They do not offer the kitchen as an uncomplicated site of comfort. Instead, the domestic becomes another reliquary – a place where love is stored in food, in small rituals, in the refusal to waste what should be eaten, in the sharpness of a parent’s warning. One of the book’s great achievements is how it treats taste as a moral sense. The mouth becomes an archive. The tongue becomes a witness. What you can swallow, what you cannot, what you are taught to find delicious or disgusting – all of it becomes a record of belonging and estrangement.
The collection’s first movement is especially attentive to formation: how a self is made, especially a masculine self, under pressures that are both intimate and historical. A sequence that borrows its title from the first books of “The Odyssey” reads like an anatomy of inheritance. The father appears not as a sentimental figure of guidance but as a transmitter of vigilance: hair parted and pressed down with pomade, the memory of drills, the sense of the world as a place where catastrophe can sound at any moment. Villanueva is not interested in confession for confession’s sake. He is interested in the mechanisms by which the body learns to brace itself. The poems suggest that what we inherit from our parents is often not narrative but posture.
If Part I of “Reliquaria” often feels like a series of incisions – purposeful cuts that reveal nerve and tendon and the hidden freight of the ordinary – Part II turns toward the slow, exhausting labor that follows injury: caregiving, ritual, farewell. Here the poems are saturated with thresholds. A cemetery becomes a city. A farewell dinner becomes a study in what cannot be consumed. Illness enters not as dramatic plot but as schedule: gauze, pills, the climb up stairs, the embrace that doubles as a crutch. The book’s spiritual vocabulary deepens in these poems, though “spiritual” may be the wrong word for what Villanueva is doing. He is not using belief to lift the material world into metaphor. He is allowing belief to be another material – another substance that can be handled, frayed, burned, and carried.
The epigraphs that open each section function like tuning forks. They set a pitch for the reader’s ear: the sense that endings are present from the beginning; that amazement is not naïveté but an ethical stance; that bodies do not simply die but change into other bodies, other substances, other stories. Villanueva’s work is full of transformations, though they rarely feel like redemption. “Reliquaria” is allergic to the easy consolations that sometimes come attached to religious imagery. The poems can be devotional, but they are not pious. They are more interested in what faith costs than in what it promises. Prayer is a gesture with worn edges. It may be necessary, but it is never guaranteed to work.
One of the most striking aspects of Villanueva’s craft is how he makes erudition feel bodily. References do not arrive as literary name-dropping. They arrive as part of the book’s nervous system. Renaissance anatomy and Catholic relic culture are not remote subjects; they are ways of thinking about what it means to live in a body that will be touched, broken, preserved, forgotten, displayed. When the poems glance toward “De Humani Corporis Fabrica,” the interest is not only in the historical text but in the mindset that wants to name every part. Villanueva is drawn to the desire for mastery, and he keeps showing where mastery fails – where the sacred slips beyond the scalpel, where the human refuses to be fully legible.
That refusal becomes explicit when the book widens into public catastrophe and its aftershocks. A poem that moves through New York after 9/11 does not traffic in spectacle. It is attentive instead to the atmospheres that linger: the way the city asks you to look, the way it asks you to remember, the way memory itself can become a battleground. Villanueva understands that commemoration is not neutral. It can be weaponized, made into a demand, turned into a test of belonging. The poem’s anger is not abstract; it is bodily. It is the memory of threat, of being read as unwanted, of needing to name ghosts in order to survive them.
“Reliquaria” is, among other things, a book about how bodies become objects. A disappeared person becomes a display. A dead relative becomes a story told and retold until it has the varnish of inevitability. An animal becomes the target of a trap justified as domestic necessity. Villanueva is brave enough to enter that justification and show the cruelty inside it. The mouse poem in Part II is chilling not because it depicts violence, but because it depicts how quickly the mind builds a moral architecture to house violence and call it reasonable. The poem does not excuse. It does not flinch. It watches the self become capable of what it did not want to admit it could do.
If Part II is the book’s vigil, Part III is its release – not release into comfort, but into a broader, stranger field of transformation. Here the poems become more overtly mythic and archival. They are concerned with catacombs and specimens, with artworks that preserve the illusion of permanence, with bones that outlast names. They are also concerned with weight – with ballast, gravity, pressure. There is a repeated insistence that humans are not designed for lightness. Even when we dream of ascension, our marrow is full of iron. The poems do not mock that heaviness. They treat it as a kind of truth: a reminder that to be human is to be bound to a world of matter, to be obligated to the ground that will take you back.
A long persona piece set in the descent to the Mariana Trench uses exploration as a metaphor that resists easy uplift. The deep sea becomes an analogue for the limits of perception, for the failure of language at extreme pressure, for the way awe can feel like fear. Villanueva is adept at creating a sense of the sublime without romanticizing it. His sublime is not a mountain vista; it is the recognition that there are depths – literal and moral – that the human body can enter only briefly, and at cost.
The book’s archival imagination comes to a head in poems that contemplate catacombs, museum specimens, and the preservation of bones as cultural objects. Villanueva’s attention here is double. On one hand, he is moved by the stubbornness of what remains: the evidence that someone lived, that a civilization loved and buried and carried its dead. On the other hand, he is wary of the ways preservation can become another form of control – the dead turned into inventory, the sacred turned into exhibit. This tension is integral to “Reliquaria’s” project. It does not want to choose between reverence and critique. It wants to keep both alive, even when they grind against each other.
The book’s mythic and biblical sequences perform another kind of transformation: the transformation of voice. Villanueva speaks through figures whose stories are saturated with violence – Judith, Medusa, Ugolino, Isaac – and he refuses to sanitize them. What emerges is not a set of moral parables but a set of intimate monologues that make the ancient stories feel newly unsettled. The poems are particularly attuned to how violence erases the self, how trauma can turn memory into stone. The Medusa poem is devastating in its insistence that the horror is not only the monstrous body but the loss of the former self, the soft hair, the sweetness, the possibility of being loved outside of fear. Myth becomes a way of talking about what cannot be said straight on: the psychic cost of being turned into an object of someone else’s narrative.
One of the pleasures of “Reliquaria” is its formal variety. Villanueva moves between lyric, sequence, persona, list-like accumulations, and moments that feel almost essayistic in their clarity. His line breaks often create a sense of pressure, as if the poem is trying to keep too much inside it. He uses white space and fragmentation not as fashionable gestures but as structural equivalents of breath, interruption, the mind catching on what it cannot easily cross. The sound work is meticulous. Consonants click and grind. Vowels open and thicken. You can feel the poems in the mouth, as Kimiko Hahn’s blurb in the book’s front matter suggests, but what lingers is not only texture. It is the way texture becomes meaning.
At the same time, the book occasionally risks the danger that attends any highly wrought style: saturation. There are moments when the density of image and reference can feel like a sealed chamber – a reliquary that does not easily open to the reader’s oxygen. This is not a flaw so much as a choice with consequences. Villanueva is writing against the flattened diction that dominates so much contemporary speech, and his resistance is admirable. Yet the reader sometimes has to work through thickets of metaphor and allusion before reaching the poem’s emotional pulse. For some, that labor will be part of the book’s pleasure – the sense of being asked to attend, to slow down, to earn the revelation. For others, it may create a distance, a glass between the hand and the relic.
The emotional temperature of “Reliquaria” is also distinctive. Villanueva is not a poet of easy disclosure. His tenderness often arrives obliquely – through objects, through actions, through the memory of a grandmother’s oxygen mask, through the father’s glance that cannot be sustained. This restraint is one reason the book feels sophisticated: it does not manipulate. It trusts the reader to recognize the emotional stakes without being instructed how to feel. But restraint can also mean that some poems keep their heat behind a veil. The book’s best moments – and there are many – are the ones where the veil thins, where the lyric intensity and the ethical intelligence converge into a clear, unavoidable human presence.
The closing poems function less as finale than as coda, a settling. A piece that turns toward Buddhist story and the idea of being carried into heaven does not declare belief so much as it admits longing. Another poem imagines the rituals of one’s own burial with a kind of controlled tenderness that is both eerie and generous. The final “Memento Mori” returns the book to earth: compost, worms, roots, the body becoming material again. In these endings, Villanueva offers a version of grace that is unsentimental. It is not the grace of escape. It is the grace of recurrence, of being reabsorbed into the world that held you.
If I were to place “Reliquaria” on a simple scale, I’d put it at 87 out of 100, not because it lacks seriousness – it has seriousness in abundance – but because its commitment to density and its cultivated austerity can, at times, narrow the aperture through which the reader can enter. Yet that same commitment is also what makes the book feel durable, not designed for the season’s weather but for longer climates. Villanueva has written a collection that treats language as a sacred instrument without pretending it can fully save what it names. He has written poems that know the body is both altar and evidence. And he has done so with a craft that is not merely impressive, but purposeful – a craft that understands that beauty, if it is to mean anything, must be able to look directly at what it cannot keep.
“Reliquaria” is not a book you finish and forget. It leaves its residue. It asks you to consider what you carry – the rituals you inherited, the foods you refused, the histories that shaped your posture, the prayers that still rise in you even if you do not believe in the listener. It is a book that insists the sacred is not elsewhere. It is here, in the stubborn materials of living – in bone, in breath, in the mouth’s taste for what remains.
February 22, 2025
10/10 bones
May 17, 2024
I love the poem Fish Heads that is contained here - so I was tempted to just give this collection 5 stars for that. Quite a few of the poems went a little over my head and I think looking at the notes and revisiting them there are a good few that I will like a lot more as they make more sense to me.
Still lots in here I enjoyed and I saw much of the brilliance in Fish Heads on display but less of the personal and familial connections that made Fish Heads so great.
Still lots in here I enjoyed and I saw much of the brilliance in Fish Heads on display but less of the personal and familial connections that made Fish Heads so great.
June 7, 2024
I reread this collection in May in preparation for a book discussion with participants in “The Healing Kind” online group. While “Fish Heads” is the most approachable poem in the collection, there are so many others that speak through the ancestors and force a reckoning with our world. This is not the most approachable collection of poetry, but it’s important and offers a wealth of me for poems for those who write.
May 18, 2018
I loved soaking in this collection. It took me several days because my students would borrow the book, and honestly, because his poems are quite peaceful. Although the catalogued images may seem graphic at times, Villanueva combines them in such a powerful way. I highly recommend!
September 21, 2017
Beautiful words of life, death, and meaning
October 20, 2020
This collection is so beautiful. Spiritual, vulnerable, personally moving.
December 22, 2021
as worthy of being devoured in one sitting as it is to be savoured page by page. this collection is STUNNING — easily one of the best i read all year.
May 28, 2024
Read this one with my educator's book club. Won't lie - this one was a HUGE struggle for me to read and comprehend. It did bring me joy to have my students try to figure out the first poem in the collection with me. They did run it through CHATGPT and it led to a very insightful conversation about the limitations of AI and how poetry truly is a cerebral and human experience. I did enjoy writing my own "in my shoes" poem as a result of one of the other poems in this collection.
August 9, 2024
“if you each day clutch
our pillows, press them to your face, pray
to take in some atom of me all
into the hollows of your chest, yes
i promise my ghost will find you
should you want someone else to love.”
our pillows, press them to your face, pray
to take in some atom of me all
into the hollows of your chest, yes
i promise my ghost will find you
should you want someone else to love.”
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews