How to Keep Things Alive

In her latest chapbook, How To Keep Things Alive, Beth Gordon continues to explore themes of loss and grief, this time through her relationships with the living and the dead. How does one show up as a child, parent, grandparent, sibling, friend, or lover with the inevitability of death looming behind every corner of life? Are fearless love and joy still possible after loss, both expected and unexpected? Are memory and language enough to raise the dead or exorcise the guilt of our choices "necessary and wrong?" Using a variety of poetic forms and often surreal imagery, Gordon asks these questions but never offers the reader an answer. These poems beseech the universe, but the universe is silent.