Clair wills on Grief
Clair Wills reviews Denise Riley's Say Something Back and Time Lived, Without Its Flow, and The Anatomy of Grief, by Dorothy P. Holinger, in The New York Review of Books.
“Time Lived, Without Its Flow, written as a series of diary entries, was first published in 2012, and it has now been brought out again alongside Riley’s 2016 volume of poems, Say Something Back. Both prose and poetry chronicle the experience of living inside a kind of secondhand death, and of finding yourself yearning for the real thing. Six months after her son’s death she haunts meetings of bereaved parents, online and in person, and discovers that the habit of hoping “for their own rapid death” is so common as to be unremarkable.”