Table with Burning Candle

With a dual sense of convulsion and care, Table with Burning Candle tackles a subject that is every parent’s worst nightmare-the death of a child. Grieving the loss of her son to opioid addiction and eventual overdose, Julia Paul questions how to move forward in the face of unspeakable loss. Poems speak to God, the coroner, and death itself. But more so, they confront death, absence, the importance, or lack thereof, of the body, and imagine the afterlife. Yet, as Paul reminds us, everyone knows grief, and sharing grief gives us the courage to live in the madness and beauty of the world, no matter the circumstance.