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Good Grief Weston – Grief’s Alphabet

Join Carrie Etter as she reads from and discusses her recent and highly acclaimed poetry collection Grief’s Alphabet, a shattering elegy for the poet’s mother that celebrates love in the same breath as it weeps for its loss.   

The early poems portray the family from its beginnings with the narrator’s adoption through adolescence, addressing experiences of bereavement, poverty, attempted suicide, and teenage pregnancy. The second section wrenchingly conveys the mother’s unexpected death and the banal yet painful aftermath of sorting clothes, finding the will, and arranging the funeral, as well as the first excruciating months of mourning. The final section presents life after loss through the long work of grieving. 

“An impassioned reckoning with the aftermath of Etter’s adoptive parents’ deaths. Etter has the ability to floor you as she explores guilt (“The errant daughter an ocean away”), and makes everyday observations that are anything but banal: “I collect and collect: the novel from her bedside, / bookmark never to advance.” She is particularly good at showing how finding a language for grief is close to impossible; one poem runs in its entirety, “F Is for Fuck This.””

Rishi Dastidar, The Guardian, April 2024