Still Falling: Poems

(Paperback)

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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."

Reviews

"Still Falling is an undeniably gorgeous book of love poems full of grief. In these pages, Jennifer Grotz writes line after line of direct statement in rhythms that would leave any reader breathless and wanting more: 'I will call desert this kingdom that you were, / sun this loneliness. I will say / wasp to name the fear.' I am in awe of Grotz's power to grow and transform book after book. I cannot read Still Falling without crying."--Jericho Brown

Author Bio

Jennifer Grotz is the author of three previous collections of poetry, Window Left Open, The Needle, and Cusp. A professor at the University of Rochester, she directs the Bread Loaf Writers' Conferences.