Asking is my sixth collection of poems. These poems were written for my husband, who died suddenly in 2014. They are poems of mourning but also an exploration of life after losing a close partner of many years, that person taking with them part of the self. “What Will You Do?” is a poem titled after the question so many people asked in the months after my husband died. At sixty-seven, years of formation behind me, I had to fashion a new self, a new way of living in the world. The millions of Americans facing life after a loved one lost to the Corona virus will recognize this challenge and will hopefully be comforted by my explorations and meditations.

Tess Gallagher (Is, Is Not, Graywolf) writes of the poems:

“Asking is what our entire country is doing—asking how to bear up under the loss of so many, these absences of our dearly beloveds. These poems answer by more than memory—by joining the beloved to the present in a way that makes asking itself an answer. An exceptional mind is at work here, lyrically, and with suppositional insistence, making a framework in poetry to approach and re-approach the death and the love—its successes and daily quandaries, its deep companioning—this is what really makes this book sing.“