Regarding Us by Terri Drake

“Incantatory and lushly imagistic, Terri Drake’s Regarding Us is a haunting elegy for love and landscape lost—a pilgrim’s journey through distances both temporal and geographic.  From the stark space of the midwestern prairie to the abundant and imperiled vineyards of California, Drake tracks the currents of fire and water that ravage or sustain, revisiting a complex history in the wake of a beloved’s death. Though memory conjures “sentence after sentence of disquiet” and “unwritten stanzas//trailing like the tail of a comet/in winter’s darkness,” the poet forges a path through grief, past the “shrill anthems of the world.” Regarding Us reflects a fierce vision of restorative wisdom rooted in the elemental. “I believe” Drake writes, “the live oak bears witness/to our losses. That our grief/is equal to our love.” These are poems of remarkable beauty and uncanny grace.”

–Jane Satterfield, author of Apocalypse Mix

Weaving grief into celebration, the relentless, transcendent lyricism of Regarding Us hurls readers into another world where loss is sutured to song. Drake invites the reader to celebrate the “I” of the collection’s desire for the “you”—triumphally constituting the “us” of the volume through empathy and irresistible image. Surviving fire, distance, and dysfunction, the poems weave a poignant trajectory that creates the “us” that is retrospectively lost—such that readers too cannot but hold them both in highest regard.

–Dion Farquhar, author Just Kidding