Description
The centerpiece of this collection, "Elegy for My Sister," is a sequence of poems on the suicide of the poet's sister. It opens with the haunting question, "Who was she whose death now made her / a stranger to me?" That simple question, so intimately linked to the larger issues of identity, grief, memory, love, language, and family history, leads him to gather, piece by piece, the scattered fragments of his sister's life. In other poems, Sherod Santos follows this elegiac theme into the broader contexts of the Holocaust, myth, and contemporary history to explore the ways each private loss is overlaid by those harrowing conditions through which our century defines itself.
