How Should We Dress to Spread Ash? by Jennifer Weiss

Name: How Should We Dress to Spread Ash? by Jennifer Weiss
Availability: InStock

$17.99

Paper

979-8-89990-717-3

2026

This title will be released on October 16, 2026

.

HOW SHOULD WE DRESS TO SPREAD ASH? includes poems that encompass caregiving, saying goodbye to aging parents, grief and resolution. In this debut chapbook, the author reflects on her parents’ paths, personalities and personae with raw truth, tenderness and humor. The personal becomes universal in this narrative exploration of intertwined lives, love, loss and acceptance.

Proceed to Checkout

BookSKU:

Description
Reviews (0)

Jennifer Weiss, J.D., grew up in rural New Jersey and graduated from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and University of Virginia School of Law. After a career of practicing law, serving in the North Carolina House of Representatives and running a nonprofit, she is devoting more time to writing. She was awarded the 2022 NC State Poetry Prize, and her poems appear in Kakalak, North Carolina Literary Review, Qu Literary Magazine, The Main Street Rag and other publications. When she is not writing, she is volunteering, swimming, reading, gardening, hiking and spending time with her family. She is passionate about children’s literacy. Jennifer and her husband live in North Carolina. For more information about Jennifer’s poetry, visit jenniferweisspoetry.com.

PRAISE:

“In your last, / monitored, / breath-struggled moments, / we held your hands, and let you go,” writes Jennifer Weiss, in her poignant, elegiac, and elegantly realized How Should We Dress to Spread Ash? Weiss’s poems meditate on the loss of her beloved parents, exploring the paradoxical way an absence, deeply felt, engenders enduring forms of presence. Throughout the collection, Weiss’s keen eye and careful craft limn grief with grace and illuminate even the most painful memories with a warm lyric light. In the collection’s title poem, Weiss conjures what it means to be “among kin at dawn, sprinkling fistfuls / of ash and bone chip like sown seeds,” reminding us how every end burgeons with beginnings.

–Michael Prior, Associate Professor, Mellon ACM Faculty Fellow, Macalester College and author of Burning Province and Model Disciple

Piercing images rise from the ashes in Jennifer Weiss’s absorbing portrayal of her driven father and pliable mother’s quest for perfection. Weiss, the wry, dutiful daughter, concentrates like an expert on Diamond Row identifying fault lines in would-be gems. What to bring when you scatter ashes? Love and an incisive eye on which nothing is lost.

–Michael Gaspeny, author of Flight Manual and A Postcard from the Delta

How Should We Dress to Spread Ash? by Jennifer Weiss tells the story of a family in two parts: one for the poet’s father and one for the poet’s mother. These poems serve as an entrance for us as the reader to peek into Weiss’s identity and history and take a moment to reflect upon ways we move through grief and memory. The father tells the poet at one point, that she is”…the kind of person/ who planted seeds and dug them up/ every day to see if they were growing.” Glimpses of each parent’s personality, ways of being, and lineage are interwoven with the poet’s childhood and her caretaking for each parent at the end of their lives, giving us a world of love and care with an undercurrent of unease, anger, sadness, and reckoning. All of this sprinkled with a poetic tenderness of monarch butterflies in gardens, gentle seeds for planting, memories of sunshiny beach days, sharing desserts, and questions about all that our dead leave us. All at once, Weiss gives us joy and pain, love and endurance, and we are certainly better for it.

–Liza Wolff-Francis, 8th Carrboro, NC Poet Laureate and author of 48 hours down the shore

Reviews

There are no reviews yet.

Be the first to review “How Should We Dress to Spread Ash? by Jennifer Weiss”