Family

Reflecting on loss with a poet’s eye for detail and wonder, the core of this piercing outing from Ladin (The Future Is Trying to Tell Us Something) chronicles the loss of her mother to dementia. In moving poems that explore their shifting relationship, Ladin recounts the experience of visiting with her mother: “I felt your love/ as you were dying/ one memory at a time// when you squeezed my hand./ It was love,/ I’m sure of it,// and not just fear or loneliness,/ but I still don’t understand/ what kind of love we shared.” Other poems consider the losses Ladin has sustained in recent years, from illness and disability to a faculty position and apartment: “This bedroom, like my job, immediately starts slipping into the past, but the bed is still here, carrying me like a raft into the bedroom-less waters where I imagined a future.” Ladin turns her attention toward her own white privilege in the last section of the book, critiquing a system that, throughout much of Ladin’s life, hid itself from view: “Even when we were alone,/ whiteness kept us under surveillance.// Eyes disguised as carpet stains/ watched my mother and I rehearse// the whiteness that was to me/ invisible as love.” Tender yet tenacious, these poems transmute loss into potent lyricism. (Sept.)