I don’t think I’ve ever read such a moving account of loss as Lisa Dart gives us in these poems. This is grief that takes over every part of her and is evoked by everything around her—a pair of shoes, a dropped daffodil bulb, a headboard, falling snow. These are poems that howl and cry, that long for rescue and the turning back of time. Yet in the end that all-pervasive mourning becomes the sign, and the music, of life continuing. Aching, profound and beautiful.

—ANN WROE, The Economist

Intense, honest, full of colour and created with technical mastery, Lisa Dart’s courageous and beautiful collection brings us near – to the arc of grief following the sudden death of her life partner; to the limits of what the psyche can endure; to the domestic minutiae that create the loved texture of a shared life. The poet is self-knowing – with knowledge that is hard won through exploration: poem after poem interrogates, in highly visual and rich language, this ‘winter so cold’, bringing a metaphysical quality to this outstanding poet’s ‘morning mourning’s candour’.

—KAY SYRAD, poet and novelist

Her “limb-locked numbness.” Her “hard, unending / midnight dark.” The “suffocating soil / of shock” that buries her. Yes, Lisa Dart’s intense lyric collection is a candid and unflinching chronicle of her profound grief. But, in addition to the formidable force of this sorrow, each of her poems contains—explicit or not—the “sunlit, snow-swan image” of her dead beloved’s face. Each moving poem is buoyed by the even more formidable force of her love. By the time we reach the last page of this finely-crafted work, her breakdown has become her breakout that’s become her breakthrough. This stunning book is a chronicle not only of grief, but a record of grief transcended.

—PAULANN PETERSEN, Oregon Poet Laureate Emerita

It’s a triumph that Peter would be so very proud of. A tremendous range of form and tonal variation—poems admirable in their carefulness, precision, balance, and forbearance. Splendid.

—CLARE BEST, reader

(We) were both very deeply moved by the quality of your writing; its ability to so poignantly capture the raw anguish and desperate bleakness and the long, hard road back to the possibility of a life beyond. (The poems) really are exceptionally fine and I am so glad that you were able in the midst of your grief to put pen to paper and craft them.

—LINDA HAMMOND, reader