Overview

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.

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9781781727508

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Art and kitsch rub shoulders in this abecedarium where like a shaken box of assorted biscuits, the letters land every which way. The lucky reader of Grief's Alphabet is offered care and sweetness alongside blood and axle grease. Mourning tastes of love. Expansive and rebellious, Carrie Etter rebodies that familiar trope, the ghost, fantastically back-projecting her childhood self even into family times before her birth.;These poems show Etter growing into language, sharing her first poem lakeside with her mother. They also jolt us into loss, through words and spaces. Here, poets, and people, are not wounded creatures who sing, but singing creatures who are wounded -- an important and life-giving difference. For solitude, read solicitude. - Anthony (Vahni) Capildeo;‘Is it too late / to become a better daughter?’, asks the author of this taut, emotionally charged collection, before answering with an unflinching affirmative. Grief’s Alphabet is both a moving account in verse of the speaker’s journey through a life of growing and grieving, loss and resolution, and a celebration of the joy that love can generate. While the speaker is never afraid to turn her forensic lens on herself, the true focus of these poems lies elsewhere. Cinematic and technically adroit, they are above all a love song to one particular mother (the speaker’s cherished ‘Modie’) who lives on not only in her ‘exuberant, zaftig’ daughter but everywhere and in her own right in the book's quietly triumphant final image: a seed that cracks open to drink in the light. - Julia Copus;“The story of family is the well from which a writer draws and drinks the rest of her life. In Grief’s Alphabet, poet Carrie Etter is in top form, singing an elegy for her mother, one that is as wise as it is heartbreaking. Here, ordinary materials reveal an extraordinary love. A collection of lighthouse statuary is dignified by the poet’s appreciation of the memory of salt spray they provide a mother of five daughters in America’s heartland. Having lost both parents in a two-year span, Etter moves us from shock, “I spoke by weeping and wept by keening,” to the regrets borne by a grown child, “[i]s it too late/ to become a better daughter?/Yes, it is too late. Still I.” Etter provides a catalogue of loss and the ways that a mother’s love continues to transform us, even after death.”- Connie Voisine;'When reading about grief, the reader often feels a paradoxical consolation, sensing that the writing process has enacted, or begun to, a healing one, meaning we rarely experience unprocessed grief in a poem. Carrie Etter gives us that rare experience. Using the anti-language of poetry – its white space, its obfuscations, time-jumps, lucid yet unexplained details – Etter performs a painfully remarkable magic trick: she gives a voice to ‘soundless keening,’ the grief that cannot speak.'- Caroline Bird

"Art and kitsch rub shoulders in this abecedarium where like a shaken box of assorted biscuits, the letters land every which way. The lucky reader of Grief's Alphabet is offered care and sweetness alongside blood and axle grease. Mourning tastes of love. Expansive and rebellious, Carrie Etter rebodies that familiar trope, the ghost, fantastically back-projecting her childhood self even into family times before her birth.;These poems show Etter growing into language, sharing her first poem lakeside with her mother. They also jolt us into loss, through words and spaces. Here, poets, and people, are not wounded creatures who sing, but singing creatures who are wounded -- an important and life-giving difference. For solitude, read solicitude. - Anthony (Vahni) Capildeo;'Is it too late / to become a better daughter?', asks the author of this taut, emotionally charged collection, before answering with an unflinching affirmative. Grief's Alphabet is both a moving account in verse of the speaker's journey through a life of growing and grieving, loss and resolution, and a celebration of the joy that love can generate. While the speaker is never afraid to turn her forensic lens on herself, the true focus of these poems lies elsewhere. Cinematic and technically adroit, they are above all a love song to one particular mother (the speaker's cherished 'Modie') who lives on not only in her 'exuberant, zaftig' daughter but everywhere and in her own right in the book's quietly triumphant final image: a seed that cracks open to drink in the light. - Julia Copus;""The story of family is the well from which a writer draws and drinks the rest of her life. In Grief's Alphabet, poet Carrie Etter is in top form, singing an elegy for her mother, one that is as wise as it is heartbreaking. Here, ordinary materials reveal an extraordinary love. A collection of lighthouse statuary is dignified by the poet's appreciation of the memory of salt spray they provide a mother of five daughters in America's heartland. Having lost both parents in a two-year span, Etter moves us from shock, ""I spoke by weeping and wept by keening,"" to the regrets borne by a grown child, ""[i]s it too late/ to become a better daughter?/Yes, it is too late. Still I."" Etter provides a catalogue of loss and the ways that a mother's love continues to transform us, even after death.""- Connie Voisine;'When reading about grief, the reader often feels a paradoxical consolation, sensing that the writing process has enacted, or begun to, a healing one, meaning we rarely experience unprocessed grief in a poem. Carrie Etter gives us that rare experience. Using the anti-language of poetry - its white space, its obfuscations, time-jumps, lucid yet unexplained details - Etter performs a painfully remarkable magic trick: she gives a voice to 'soundless keening,' the grief that cannot speak.'- Caroline Bird"

Author Information

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.

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