Good Grief: A Collection of Poetry and Prose: A Somatic Approach to the Intersection of Grief and the Arts

Grief is not only something you feel. It is something your body carries.

Jenna Duranko came to that understanding late, thirty-two years after her first loss, which arrived before she had language for it. Since then, grief has become the lens through which she reads her whole life: friendships that ended without ceremony, places that stopped feeling like home, a country grieving in public.

Good Grief is a collection of poetry and prose that follows grief through the body. Trained in thanatology, ministry, and music, Duranko draws on Peter Levine's Somatic Experiencing to track where loss lives in the nervous system. She then follows the creative impulse that rises once it is finally felt. The poems move through three sections: acknowledgment, the depths, and the first cracks of light.

This book is for you if:

• Your loss doesn't have a ritual attached to it
• You've been told you should be over it by now
• You're grieving someone who is still alive
• You suspect your body has been keeping a record your mind hasn't caught up to
• You want a book that will not rush you.

Three poems come paired with original marimba compositions you can listen to as you read. The collection closes with a guided somatic exercise for moving from sensation to creation, an invitation to make something from your own grief.

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Good Grief is published by Tehom Center Publishing, an independent press elevating queer and BIPOC voices. Discover more at tehomcenter.com.