Questions of Loss by Kaitlin Murphy-Knudsen

Murphy-Knudsen offers a stunning meditation on how absence shapes a life. These poems confront love and death, the body and motherhood, private griefs and shared wounds with Dickinson-like steadiness that turns loss into something both devastating and luminous.

—Laura Kepner, Author, Managing Editor of Odet Journal (2016-2020)

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We were lucky to see poems and fiction from Kaitlin Murphy-Knudsen come across our submissions threshold, and even luckier to publish them more than once—including the poems in this collection, “Fountain of Youth, St. Augustine, Florida,” and “Heat.” Reading Questions of Loss as a complete collection confirms what was evident from the beginning: This is a poet willing to endure “the violence of beauty as it soars and weighs through a moment,” and to record what remains after the soaring. Murphy-Knudsen writes from midlife’s fault lines—where grandmother, daughter, mother, patient, and witness converge. In these pages, loss is bodily and exact. Even where despair enters and in less capable hands would write an easy script, these poems insist on something messier, truer. Sentiment, irony, and platitudes have no place in such fierce truths. Questions of Loss is a book that does not protect itself from the braided contradictions and difficult expressions of living. It offers its oblation—and trusts the reader to feel the rope in their own hands.

—Tad Bartlett, Managing Editor, The Peauxdunque Review (2018 – 2024)