Instructions for My Mother’s Funeral

Winner of the 2011 Donald Hall Prize in PoetrySelected by Dorianne LauxThis collection examines how the loss of a parent at a young age can color the way that child looks at the world even when the child is no longer a child.

This collection is divided into three sections. The first opens with the speaker’s reflections on her childhood loss of her father and subsequent move to a new house and a new life, a life in which she is always alert to the absences and danger but also a life in which she begins to see language as a kind of salvation. This section also develops the speaker’s first knowledge of sex, primarily in the poems, \u201cThe Goose Girl\u201d and \u201cA Woman Was Raped Here.\u201d The second section follows the speaker into adolescence and young adulthood, and these poems further explore the sexual violence in the world in which the speaker lives, and how this violence affects her own feelings toward sex and romantic love. In the third section, the book finds love, work, and family, and the poems in this section about motherhood echo back to the first section as the speaker’s own parenting is influenced by how difficult it is to love when you know people die.