Like My Mother Before Me,

We Have An Idea - A Very Modern Idea - That Dying Is Undignified. But I Think This Is Because We Have The Illusion That We Can Control Our Bodies And Our Fates.

With Ferocity And Extraordinary Craft, Lizzie Harris Has Made A Book Of Poems That Resonates Far Beyond The Personal Stories It Tells. Stop Wanting Reveals, In Every Lyric, Its Author's Profound Metaphorical Gifts. In Its Ironies And Intensities, It Brings To Mind A Writer Like The Young Sylvia Plath, Though What Is Startling About Harris' S Work Is The Way It Combines Those Gifts With A Muted, Deft Self-awareness. Most Of All, These Are Wonderfully Shaped, Powerful, And Surprising Poems-a Startling Debut.

Nothing Prepared Me For The Loss Of My Mother. Even Knowing That She Would Die Did Not Prepare Me.

I Envy My Jewish Friends The Ritual Of Saying Kaddish - A Ritual That Seems Perfectly Conceived, With Its Built-in Support Group And Its Ceremonious Designation Of Time Each Day Devoted To Remembering The Lost Person.

Much Of Hamlet Is About The Precise Kind Of Slippage The Mourner Experiences: The Difference Between Being And Seeming, The Uncertainty About How The Inner Translates Into The Outer, The Sense That One Is Expected To Perform Grief Palatably. (if You Don’t Seem Sad, People Worry; But If You Are Grief-stricken, People Flinch Away From Your Pain.)