From The Other Room

Anna M. Warrock speaks the language of grief with eloquence and courage. She understands that the experience of death changes the experience of life, that the shock of loss "reshapes / the room, the lamps, / the dust." In spare, precise, achingly lyrical verse, Warrock faces her ghosts and transforms pain into art. An adolescent girl stares into a cupboard after her mother's funeral, realizing "the glasses do not know my mother / is dead," that the world spins on despite our grief, and creates her own ritual, opening and closing the cupboard door, struggling to move on. The effect is quietly shattering. These poems may or may not console the poet. They will console the rest of us, who have been there, and who owe Anna M. Warrock our deepest gratitude.

- Martín Espada, author of Vivas to Those Who Have Failed

These elegiac poems approach profound loss as one might a new language, awed at first by its strange idioms and later by their beauty. I am reminded, reading Warrock, of the heartbreaking wit of Szymborska. Here, the speaker remembers, not with nostalgia but with wonderment, coming back to the knowing of a thing, setting it sorrowfully in its new and perfect context. From the Other Room is a lamentation, but tender and thorough. The clean, dry-eyed poems are authoritative, but their certainty is humble and quietly generous. The melancholy shines through with gemlike radiance.

- Frannie Lindsay, author of If Mercy