The Poetry of Grief

Eileen G’Sell reviews two new poetry collections, Virginia Konchan’s “Requiem” and Cass Donish’s “Your Dazzling Death.”

By Eileen G’SellMarch 18, 2025

• Poetry

GRIEF DIFFERS from day-to-day sadness, which any sensitive person likely experiences out of empathy, if not some personal duress. But grief, grief is truly sublime. It magnifies. It morphs. It is adolescent. It is an avalanche for the heart, but also for the elbows, wrists, and earlobes. Anguish is often cut with a gram of adrenaline: how else to endure the pain without the high that defines—and defies—the lowest of conceivable lows?

Poets are no strangers to grief. Some might say we only learn to paddle in its waters. Keats, Rossetti, Komunyakaa, Bang, Coleridge, Millay, Clifton. All the same, it’s rare to write well in the (death) grip of grief. Forget what Hemingway (or, more accurately, a 1940s sportswriter) said about writing as an act of opening your veins and bleeding. Only a fool (or a midcentury male sports columnist) would claim such a thing. Grief ravages perception, and what is bled is often befuddling to behold. In our death-denying culture, resorting to cliché can feel like a matter of survival. Whether peddled in the Hallmark aisle or from the tongue of an earnest eulogist, platitudes are not always pathetic. There are times we have to lie to ourselves in order to live.

But two American poets have refused to do so—even in the aftermath of ineffable loss. Virginia Konchan’s Requiem (2025) and Cass Donish’s Your Dazzling Death (2024) were both written in what can only be deemed dire emotional circumstances: for Konchan, the death of her mother Theresa after over a year in hospice; for Donish, the loss of their life partner Kelly, by suicide, during the early days of the pandemic. Both poets cross the highline of grief, an extreme sport for even those who’ve weathered great altitudes before. Both poets further resist the temptation of catharsis, of insulting their readers—and their dead—with the idea that writing itself can somehow bring them peace.

Language instead becomes a fraught, but requisite, way to reckon with (im)mortality. “One day soon I will say goodbye to language / so [my mother] can ascend to an alternative universe / called heaven where there is no need of it,” writes Konchan in “Valediction,” one of several poems set in her mother’s hospice. In the final poem, “Causa Sui,” the speaker reflects on a bond with her mother that exceeded language: “My words, spoken to my mother, / need no translation: we were one. / My words to her were freely given, / not wrested from me as a confession / of diminished ability to serve others / or continuing incapacity to survive.” Referencing Freud’s term for the subject’s traumatic recognition of separation from the mother, the Latin phrase “causa sui” also applies to the pantheistic possibility of becoming and evolving over time.

Given that Kelly was also a poet, Donish considers the power of words in light of her advice: “You said metonymy, ‘when it’s good,’ / is more than simply language,” writes the speaker in “On Proliferation.” Calling out the appellation chosen during Kelly’s gender transition is a way to honor how the act of naming sets forth new realities, ones that live on even when the physical person is gone:

        Change of name,
        it is ontological—

                                        it is extension.                Your existence.

Donish speaks to their specific beloved directly, in a lyric that visually embraces the void of the page, as though daring to defy it. In the title poem, the speaker explains that they are “dazzled as in / what dazzles can floor / can devour.” As Kelly’s sudden absence stuns, it also sharpens the senses; every object or image left in her wake achieves an animistic spark. In “The Question of Surviving This,” when the speaker admits they have “no appetite,” language itself seems hungry enough to eat the page whole:

        Let me paint this

                        entire country
                        the colors of your face
                        the last time I

                                                saw you alive

By contrast, Konchan’s dense, single-stanza poems occasionally address the specific beloved who has died, or is dying, but more often address an intimate, genderless God. Following the Italian root of “stanza” as “room,” Konchan in the past has acknowledged her “block stanzas” as being conducive to “a density or compactness of meaning, a studio apartment rather than a house.” In Requiem, the serial nature of the block stanza, combined with its divine auditor, corrals the reader into so many narrow rooms of awe and despair.

Purposefully claustrophobic in form, Requiem merges the metaphysical, the confessional, and the bracingly political. Konchan’s speaker is at once resolute and indignant—a wide-eyed Kathy Acker apprising the “cruel gift” of a “white anemone,” an Emily Dickinson tilda-ing outward to indict the heartlessness of late capitalism. “Past where language ends and god begins,” she writes in “Afterimage.” “What is wealth but adding zeroes to a sum?” In “Applicant,” the speaker recounts: “I am not well enough to perform my duties, / I said to my boss. He said, do them anyway.” Lines later, she reveals: “At night, I close my eyes, and I’m propelled into / space, where I don’t have to oblige or indulge the / man, as in an episode of Cheers, where everyone / knows my name despite my efforts at anonymity.”

Dappled with demotic parlance, Konchan’s poems insist on their spiritual register—“the bling of real presence, in eternity,” a “to-do list” burned “ceremonially,” the realization that “the world won’t fuck off until I’m no longer / in this world.” Konchan spares no one in her assessment of somatic or spiritual survival, least of all herself. Due to death’s imminence, no one, obviously, can be spared. In “Breviary,” which recounts the moments immediately after her mother’s death, Konchan’s speaker confronts the impossibility of the loss. “If you knew her, you’d know she could never die, / would never leave us here alone in a pit of despair.” The poem ends with a defiant rejection of mortality: “They don’t know you are alive in every goodness, / every wink, every cell and atom dissolving in air.”

Requiem’s Catholicism is one of reverence for miracle, for foolish sacrifice, for Christ’s heartbroken promise to forgive. In “Vespers,” the speaker hears “the starlings singing each to each. / At the limit of [her] perception, awareness: / at recognition’s edge, consciousness of / pleasure as more than absence of pain.” After ruminating, like Wallace Stevens, on the experience of the sensory world, she resolves to “bring thinking under the obedience of Christ, / whose thoughts are greater than those below.” Such reverence is matched with a deep irreverence for decorum and sanctimony. “Not eating when you’re not hungry / is a sign of nobility,” asserts the speaker of “Midlife,” “but the bar is low / after the advent of digital colonialism.” A line later, she pithily shares, “My best and worst lover was cocaine, / because it made me a better worker.” More than once in the book, Konchan’s speaker acknowledges her own brushes with death due to addiction or misfortune. Recalling an overdose that left her unconscious at the wheel, she describes her “brain always dialing back / to near-death experiences as a / litmus test of what it means to / feel alive.”

Konchan’s is a faith based on wondrous incredulity at the limits of the human world, a resolve that there must be a better way than toil-till-we-die. God’s grace is the intimate knowledge that one’s value is much more than one’s income or productivity, the shallow markers of late capitalism’s (sham) meritocracy, about as far from Christ as one can fathomably get. Hers is a mystic’s creed, stripped of pretense as it is of self-righteousness or outward judgment. As her speaker shares in “Gloria Patri,” set in a “cheap hotel room”:

I acknowledge my poverty of being and my need.
Glory be to god for this unforgiving mirror, this soap,
this Gideon Bible tucked away in the bedside drawer:
whoever dwells in the secret place of the most High
will abide under the shadow of the Almighty, I read.
A freely given gift whose only precondition is belief,
it was put there for safekeeping, for salesmen like me. 

More than a token of remembrance, Requiem serves as a wild yet equally rigorous lyric version of a Mass held in honor of the dead—her mother first and foremost, but also those spiritually torpid or moribund. “I sit and observe friends networked to death, / as if people watching at the Tate or Louvre,” shares the speaker of “Fin du Monde.”

Overt reference to God is absent in Your Dazzling Death, but Donish is no less invested in Christian and Jewish ritual as a source of revelation. Rejecting—or perhaps remaking—the Christian mythos in which Kelly was raised to betray her gender identity, Donish’s long poem “Kelly in Violet” sources from Marosa di Giorgio’s 1965 collection The History of Violets, a portion of which also lends the book its alliterative title. As a palimpsest, traces of the original text are printed in gray font, a faded homage to the Uruguayan poet’s Catholic mingling of the sensual and the sacred. “Kelly in Violet” is a verdant, impassioned portrait of a woman feminine and delicate but also teeming with energy. “You’re tall and beautiful in your flowy white jumpsuit,” declares the speaker, “walking barefoot in the park, padding softly, your soft hair pulled up high, your hands laughing.” Kelly’s femininity is embraced by the natural order; as the speaker asserts, “The butterflies want you back, the hawks want you back, the moon is pining.” Donish describes the night of Kelly’s suicide in the park on “the night of March daffodils” as a union with all that is newly spring:

the hackberry roots held you, the branches quivered, jeweled oblivion pulled you spiraling forward. An owl’s wings spoke to you, kissed you, told you to step out of your life. You listened. Your listening became desire. Your listening married the darkness. Your lashes glittered with seawater.

While so many in the human realm, including relatives, could not grasp Kelly’s womanhood, the fact of it is obvious to nature. In the sixth section, time collapses when the speaker visits Again Park, the site of Kelly’s last moments before her life violently ended: “Now I foresee the past, and recall what will come,” the speaker shares. “My skin is burning with grief, its gems, its glinting facets.” Here they cross the “threshold of trees,” and the moon is “a clock with hands whirling, changing faces.” Once time is elided, the “ancestors”—that is, the dead—can gather; meanwhile, at home, the speaker fashions an altar out of things that might call Kelly back:

white and cream candles, vases with lilies overflowing, paintbrushes with your fingerprints still on them, tiny pink roses, slivers of hackberry bark, rose quartz, clear quartz, eucalyptus, chalcedony, the last book you were reading, smoky quartz, a dead ladybug, its red translucent wings.

Back in the park, roaming restlessly at night, “primal voices, with their unforgettable pealing […] come to tell [them] the tale (again) of a wedding turned into a wake.” In a moment reminiscent of Jesmyn Ward’s 2017 novel Sing, Unburied, Sing, those silenced in death become a defiant chorus in the forest. Kelly reappears as “as a bouquet of white feathers, like snow or the color of paper.” She is less ghostly than blazingly alive, an electric force to be reckoned with. The speaker’s father, “dead more than ten years,” shows up “in his jeans,” with “an aleph float[ing] above his head”—the Jewish symbol of an omnipotent God. He protects the speaker from what he points out as a “bright thing moving in the distant trees,” advising them that their “teacher […] is a poet on her deathbed.”

In the 20th section, the speaker notices, on their walk through town, a parade of the dead: “I see my grandma walking by in her red dress and beads. And Kelly, and Drake, Anne, Hunter, Eliana, James. And my father, and my grandfather. They’re all here.” The departed congregate, as mundane as any other grouping. Their existence isn’t proof of a celestial afterlife so much as a life on earth in which the dead never truly die. “On the other side of the park […] I would gather her energy and store it,” the speaker explains. “What choice did I have? Portals to the other world would open and close, close and open.” Preserving Kelly in this way, the speaker ensures that “Kelly in Violet” is Kelly Inviolate—protected from harm, eternally free.

Both now in their forties, Konchan and Donish often approximate the incredulity of grief with the innocence of childhood. “[M]y history is now on fire / as in I’m reduced to a child,” writes Donish in their book’s title poem. “But I am but a child, face bright with the old truth,” writes Konchan in “Carpe Diem.” “I offer you my offline self, god, a dignifying word.” Here one notes the sly irony that “die” hides in “carpe diem”: if the days did not end, there would be no reason to seize them. In a similarly Romantic vein, the moon becomes, for both poets, an illuminating witness to loss. For Donish, it is “made of fabric, cream-colored, with layers of lace”; for Konchan, it “beckons to bright germination, spirit of play.” Ending the poem “Elegy,” written for her cat “killed on a road,” Konchan writes: “Call it what you like, it’s still there: / a silent, calm, ponderous presence / illuminating the heart’s empty room. / I call it grief, call it Elvira, my baby, / call it mother, or what it is, the moon.”

While both poets reckon primarily with the interior and cosmic sense of self, real-world externalities loom. For Konchan, they are primarily economic; for Donish, they are the flurry of anti-trans laws that imperiled their partner’s existence. In “Agate Beach, Lopez Island,” Donish considers what stood in the way of their future union:

        With all these threats

        looming—
                        more than five hundred
                anti-trans bills
                moving through state legislatures,
                heat in the atmosphere
                and in the sea, glaciers
                unburdening their water—

        what would it mean
                to take vows?

Though neither book ends in healing, both end with something more honest: for those who have suffered grave loss, the will to keep going has to be enough. The final entry of Donish’s series of poems titled “The Question of Surviving This” begins:

        In this, my next life

                         [since that
                one closed

                        with a bang
                the doors

                        of winter
                slamming

                        shut
                and a great

                isolation
                        opening
                                         ]

        I live with a herd of cats.
        I feed the softest in the dark,
        she’s been with me the longest,

        she’s the long-haired one,
        the anxious,
        the beautiful one.

The speaker further acknowledges finding a new romantic companion, keenly aware that he, too, is mortal: “this living // body / by my side / too temporary to imagine.” Anticipating their own death, Donish concludes the book with an image where “Kelly’s fierce // beauty / lashes out in rays,” and with the knowledge that “one day that light will carry me away.”

Konchan ends her book with the belief that poetry itself, however incompletely, can preserve some part of her mother: “No matter if I abjure fluency— / with these words I carry her, / my world, beyond the grave.” The cover of Requiem—a black-and-white photograph of a teenage Theresa standing in a body of water, its boundaries far outside the frame—suggests that she lives on in glittering youth as much as in frailty. No chapter of her life defines her more than any other—a feminist tribute to a mother who was also more than a mother. On the cover of Your Dazzling Death, a feminine hand reaches into a violet trapezoid, recalling the sketch that Kelly once designed for a tattoo on her inner forearm. This tender image is mirrored in the cover of Letters to Forget, a book of Kelly’s poetry published on the same day as Donish’s, such that the couple’s poetic “hands” might always be suspended toward each other—a queer vision of Keats’s two lovers forever about to touch. For both Donish and Konchan, there is extraordinary beauty to be found despite, and even because of, the truth of extraordinary grief.