This Living

Like the best short fiction, this exquisite collection of poems by Reka Jellema questions what it means to be human, and to survive unsayable loss. The author examines how as creatures we carry on "this living." Can we ever be close enough? Poems pay attention to "the bones we build our lives around," visit cancer wards where mothers demand resurrections for their dying children, unwrap intimacies between virtual strangers like fortune cookies. Every creature populating these poems has a reckoning - the wings of birds rise only to slam the air down. A dog senses the ghosts of her lost comrades, sniffing for "the life that got away." Lazarus stays buried - and yet the poems hold tenderness for all who have ever suffered and look toward art and creation and community as redemptive.