Breath, Suspended

Diane Alters' profound encounter with loss-the murder of her son-creates a strange fecundity. How do we carry what is unbearable, nurturing grief until, through endless labor, it gives birth to something else? These poems groan with creation, opening to compassion on all the disappeared of the world, all the Trayvon Martins, all the school children killed in endless shootings. And still, this is a work of great nakedness in which the poet bares and bears herself in witness to the life of her radiant son. "If I still had faith, would I be pain-free?" she asks. No, the pain will remain, but these poems effect a transposition, a birth, that makes pain generative, honest-an intimacy that honors and accompanies the loss.

-ELIZABETH ROBINSON, author of On Ghosts

What does it mean to write at the aperture of grief? Diane Alters' Breath, Suspended answers just this in her gorgeously crafted elegy that captures the life and loss of her son, Mando. These poems, which bridge the gap between the United States and Mexico City, show us how small and how tremendously large the distance between two bodies can be. The aperture, the space through which light passes, becomes the heart of these gut-wrenching poems. Her work gathers us on the brink between stasis and motion, between wound and breath. As Alters writes, "Vallejo gave me / an almost indecipherable word: empozarse, / a verb that puts water in an eye / and leaves it just under the rim."

-ANDREA REXILIUS, author of Sister Urn