Stomata

A powerful grief book--poems that are not so much elegiac as visionary. Stomata, Genevieve Lehr's second collection, asks that language shoulder loss, that it reach out centrifugally, at full metaphorical stretch, calling upon all its narrative and lyric resources to be adequate to human tragedy. These losses include immediate deaths, Alzheimer's, abuse, cancer, and--in a remarkable poem--residential schools, and they activate a potent spirituality that calls on a full range of imagistic resources.