The Accounts

This poignant collection of poems "is a gripping examination of the experience of a parent's death" (Harvard Review).

Winner of the Rilke Prize for Poetry

The death of a mother alters forever a family's story of itself. Indeed, it taxes the ability of a family to tell that story at all. The Accounts narrates the struggle to speak with any clear understanding in the wake of that loss.

The title poem attempts three explanations of the departure of a life from the earth—a physical account, a psyc...