Carrie Etter, photo by Fabrizia Costa
Grief’s Alphabet is Carrie Etter’s fifth collection of poetry. Her poems have appeared in The New Republic, The New Statesman, The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem, Poetry Review, The Times Literary Supplement, and many other journals and anthologies internationally. She is a member of the Creative Writing faculty at the University of Bristol, and she also writes fiction, essays, and reviews. Her website is here.
Grief’s Alphabet is a memoir in poems of the poet’s relationship with her adoptive mother up to her unexpected death and the long work of mourning. The book might also be described as a book-length elegy, trying to articulate the magnitude of this loss.
You can read more about Grief's Alphabet on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read a sample poem from the collection.
From Grief's Alphabet, by Carrie Etter
Why I Didn’t Save One of Her Lighthouses for Myself
In May 2022, the Queenscliff Maritime Museum held a competition for
a collective noun for lighthouses.
At last I faced her lighthouses, the smallest the size of my thumb.
In dozens on shelves either side of the TV.
Which Christmas did Nancy and I give her lighthouse calendars?
I could not find one to represent the whole.
All those portals for she who.
A relief of lighthouses.
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