Grief’s Alphabet

Grief’s Alphabet by Carrie Etter is a shattering elegy for the poet’s mother, opening a pathway through grief in spite of the impossible task of expressing such a loss. Beginning both chronologically and alphabetically, the collection moves from early life with the narrator’s adoption, through to the mother’s unexpected death and the banal yet painful tasks which follow, such as sorting clothes and arranging the funeral. The final section deals with life after loss, and the long work of grieving which culminates in the title poem. Evoking the complex, intimate relationship between mother and daughter, this raw yet deft collection celebrates love in the same breath as it weeps for its loss.?

American expatriate Carrie Etter has lived in England since 2001 and published three collections of poetry: The Tethers (Seren, 2009), winner of the London New Poetry Prize, Divining for Starters (Shearsman, 2011), and Imagined Sons (Seren, 2014), shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry by The Poetry Society. Her fourth collection, The Weather in Normal, was published with Seren in October 2018. She also edited Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by UK Women Poets (Shearsman, 2010) and Linda Lamus’s A Crater the Size of Calcutta (Mulfran, 2015). Her first pamphlet of short stories, Hometown, was published by V. Press in 2016. She is Reader in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University and lives in Bath.