A Raft of Grief

Poetry. "In her excellent A RAFT OF GRIEF, Chelsea Rathburn probes the varieties and nuances of love and relationships with unsparing lucidity. 'Maybe it s not the eye / but the mind that can take only so much beauty, or solitude, or pleasure, / maybe we travel both to find and forget ourselves,' she says in this book set in places as varied as Paris, Florida, Krakow. I love how she is able to affirm what can happen between two people, while asking if a story-teller sometimes has to 'sacrifice lovers and selves to the narrative arc?' She is willing to, which is one reason why her narratives are so persuasive her allegiance throughout is to the poem as a whole. She will not let her fine moments overwhelm, as lesser poets often do; her limpid, yet complicated phrasing is always part of the poem's fabric."—Stephen Dunn