Raft of Grief

"While I may have opened the book and this review with an eye for the technical, I left with a strong sense of the human business that makes good poetry, the kind we can feel in our bodies. . . . There's a critical compassion as well that acknowledges 'the fatal inattentions / anxieties and tics...our good and bad intentions, ' and despite what we lack, gives us a reason to stay afloat. --StorySouth

"In her excellent A Raft of Grief, Chelsea Rathburn probes the varieties and nuances of love and relationships with unsparing lucidity. 'Maybe it's not the eye/but the mind that can take only so much beauty, or solitude, or pleasure, / maybe we travel both to find and forget ourselves, ' she says in this book set in places as varied as Paris, Florida, Krakow. I love how she's able to affirm what can happen between two people, while asking if a story-teller sometimes has to 'sacrifice lovers and selves to the narrative arc?' She's willing to, which is one reason why her narratives are so persuasive--her allegiance throughout is to the poem as a whole. She will not let her fine moments overwhelm, as lesser poets often do; her limpid, yet complicated phrasing is always part of the poem's fabric." --Stephen Dunn

"Great hungers, little deaths, lost causes, a whole shifting cargo of 'rages, lapses, and aches'-for all the burdens in tow here, Rathburn's resilient craft is a model of buoyant aplomb. A Raft of Grief is a superbly accomplished book from a poet who has truly arrived."
--David Barber