"These are poems of absence, poems that see the world in the negative. Written in the wake of the loss of her mother, River House follows Keith as she makes her way through the depths of grief, navigating a world newly and forever transfigured and searching for purpose: "We sang that day to what our mother had been. we sang as if the sound we made had meaning." Incorporating her travels abroad, her experience studying the neutral mask technique developed by Jacques Lecoq, and her return to the river house she and her mother often visited, the poet assembles a guide to survival in the face of seemingly insurmountable pain. Even in the dark, Keith finds the ways we can be "filled with this unexpected feeling of living." Keith seeks solace in the words of others, a scholarship that deeply informs this book. Interspersed with quotes from sources as diverse as Adam Phillips and Louise Gluck, the poems here attempt to create a new system of knowledge developed to understand not just how we feel, but also how to feel. These sonnets lead us through pain and memory to a new sense of peace where the dead are here, just out of reach: "You won't believe it, but she is okay. / She has everything she needs to live." Addressing death, art, travel, and beauty, River House finds, in mourning, what it means to survive"-- Provided by publisher.
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