“About twenty pages into Luke B. Goebel's Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours, I realized I was reading with one hand holding my forehead and one balled at my waist, kind of clenched, and gazing down into the paper like a man soon to be converged upon. Goebel's testimony comes on like that: engrossing, fanatical, full of private grief, and yet, at the same time, charismatic, tender, and intrepid, aglow with more spirit than most Americans have the right to wield.” MenKindStoriesHandsSpiritReadingGriefPaperPagesTwentiesI RealizedTestimonyForeheadsFourteenLukeGazingCharismaticHand Holding Author:Blake Butler
“Emily Kendal Frey's The Grief Performance is a book that condenses a journey of finding and re-finding loss into beautiful packages. The packages are the poems and they sit shiny and new on every page of this fabulous and generous book. I want to go into the world that these poems create, just so that I can be given these terrifying presents again and again. I know you will, too. See you there.” KnowsWorldWantI CanBookBeautifulGivenLossGriefJourneyFindingsPagesPerformancesGenerousAgain And AgainFabulousPackagesEmily Author:Dorothea Lasky
“When some one sorrow, that is yet reparable, gets hold of your mind like a monomania,--when you think, because Heaven has denied you this or that, on which you had set your heart, that all your life must be a blank,--oh, then diet yourself well on biography,--the biography of good and great men. See how little a space one sorrow really makes in life. See scarce a page, perhaps, given to some grief similar to your own, and how triumphantly the life sails on beyond it.” ThinkingMenMindWellsHeartLittlesGivenHeavenSpaceGriefSorrowPagesDietsGreat MenDeniedBlankSailBiographiesScarce Author:Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
“I recently got back from Hiroshima and it was fascinating to me how the Japanese accommodate this paradox. We were talking about this word aware, which on the page looks like "aware," which speaks to both the pain and the beauty of our lives. Being there, what I perceived was that this is a sorrow that is not a grief that one forgets or recovers from, but it is a burning, searing illumination of love for the delicacy and strength of our relations.” LooksPainSpeakForgetGriefTalkingOur LivesSorrowPagesRelationBurningFascinatingParadoxIlluminationBeing ThereAccommodateDelicacyHiroshima Author:Terry Tempest Williams
“In my craft or sullen art Exercised in the still night When only the moon rages And the lovers lie abed With all their griefs in their arms, I labour by singing light Not for ambition or bread Or the strut and trade of charms On the ivory stages But for the common wages Of their most secret heart. Not for the proud man apart From the raging moon I write On these spindrift pages Nor for the towering dead With their nightingales and psalms But for the lovers, their arms Round the griefs of the ages, Who pay no praise or wages Nor heed my craft or art.” MenWritingHeartArtStillsLightAgeLyingNightCommonGriefPaySecretStageArmsProudLoversMoonAmbitionPagesSingingPraiseTradeRoundsRageBreadCraftsCharmLabourWagesHeedPsalmsIvoryNightingalesSullenProud Man Author:Dylan Thomas