Why I Didn't Go to Your Funeral

Poetry. Haunted and haunting, Colin Pope's bracing poems limn, with armorless and spectacular candor, what it means to be left behind and shaken to the core by a lover's upending illness and suicide. In these risk-taking pages, this new and necessary poet becomes a steely bard, a wide-awake chronicler, and an intrepid philosopher of the word farewell. This brave, go-for-broke first book has a razor-keen beauty and empathy so precise, so powerful and arresting that it's already clear that WHY I DIDN'T GO TO YOUR FUNERAL deserves its rightful place beside the finest literature of grief and mourning.