Little Deaths
(By Shilo Niziolek)
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| Author | Shilo Niziolek |
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Shilo Niziolek’s Little Deaths offers up a striking combination of formal experiment, incisive observation, and exquisite tenderness. Full of elegy, erasure, and homage, this collection makes clear that longing and grief are twin states, sometimes indistinguishable. The speaker insists again and again on the power of poetry to conjure what’s desired and resurrect what’s lost. Language in these poems is both a compensatory force and a political tool, a kind of magic by which the poet somehow tells us the hard truths and makes us love the world all the more. I, for one, am grateful.
- Melissa Crowe, author of Lo and Dear Terror, Dear Splendor
Shilo Niziolek’s book, Little Deaths, is full of poems sharp with the black bars of grief, the silence of the unsayable that longs to be shaped into some solid, shimmering thing. Here, all the little and big deaths are tallied. Through the fractures and occlusions, a lyric and searching voice brings us closer to the source in poems that are raw with loss, yes, but also raw with hope and wonder. The heartbreaking diptych, “When my dog is dying,” first told through an erasure, then straight on so as to obscure nothing, summons the full, obliterating force of sorrow that is as devastating as it is life-affirming. For, as deeply as this gorgeous book mourns, it also sings. This collection is a profound declaration of aliveness, awake to every radiant blooming, to every staggering moment that we are breathing. We are here, "little / bursts of green drift over us," we are letting go, "we try not to weep / when the golden hour comes," we are holding steady, "and there’s dew coating the tall green grass. / Soon the yellow iris will be in bloom, waving," we are looking up at the stars, we are witnessing miraculous things.
- Allison Titus, author of High Lonesome
Shilo Niziolek's Little Deaths marks each small loss as it chronicles the obstacles of illness, climate change, gun violence, and grief. In this intriguing collection, erasures are placed before their full poems, giving the impression of an unveiling or replenishment or return. Niziolek's work invokes a state of longing, leaving readers "sharp-toothed after monsooning" in the wake of wildfire evacuations and pop songs tied to memory. This is a writer who will continue to astonish.
- Jennifer Militello, author of The Pact”
