Other Words For Grief by Lisa Marie Rollins

“What are the words of power and ritual to raise the dead, enslaved then lost at sea in the Middle Passage’s mass grave? What are their words to confront the racism that covets them “to burst and die here again / until disintegrated flesh cant speak”? With a deft hand for archetype and myth, Rollins charts traumatic currents flowing from this history’s wreckage and surfaces a potent lexicon of visitations. Each poem is a portal–a closing of distance, a resistance to (social) death–for an urgent song. These are the words of a new and visionary poet whose gifts we didn’t know we needed all along.”

–Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, author of Interrogation Room

The poems gathered in Other Words For Grief, are a spotlight turned inward. As Lisa Marie Rollins relentlessly searches the interior with a hot light scanning blood and baby pictures; sexual encounters nearly gone awry as well as family encounters that fall short, we are moved through her fantastic string of action:

“What I know is black bodies are dropping. Crickets after the crop duster flies overhead. Mist to inhale and wrap our little shells so we disappear from the land quietly. What if his body was already coated in blood from watching reels and reels and miles and miles of footage of black bodies falling.”

Here is activity that not only provides detailed motion of an experience, but Rollins also elevates the moment, and brilliantly leads us to fully see ourselves, “this is how you call impossible/ ideas into being […] this is how you light candle spells. this is how you be.” Other Words For Grief is a consuming debut that asks the hard questions one rather avoid, but leaves us better off than where we started, “so all we need do now is raise the dead.”

–F. Douglas Brown, author of Zero to Three, winner of 2013 Cave Canem Poetry Prize.

“This is a true talent, simultaneously fierce, authentic, and loving. Lisa Marie Rollins has the craft and the fire to disturb and uplift, whether the poem speaks to race and liberation, intimacies and desire, a mother’s cancer, or a brilliant manifesto-like instruction manual of the final poem. How do we locate our way in this world? What can we do in the face of certain grief? Navigate it with art like this, with Rollins as the companion and the inspiration. Other Words For Grief is a true joy that I recommend you to read with my whole heart.”

 –Lee Herrick, author of Scar and Flower.