‘Grief, Again’ by Donte Collins

In my small corner of experience, poems centered on grief tend to either be spare, with isolated, lonely stanzas, or elegiac with performative imagery. I think that’s why ‘Grief, Again’ hit me so hard—it just pulls you immediately inside with little chance to orient yourself. The prose poem is punctuationless and reads like the middle of an ongoing consciousness with no formal beginning or end. The “again” in the title adds an almost helpless edge—grief as ever-present and hidden, as lying in wait forever.

There are many images in this poem—painful, personal images—but none quite get at the universality of grief quite like “memory is a ghost begging for new flesh.” The grief I’ve held recently is not Collins’s grief but it too begs for new flesh as it finds a little succor in a poem from a stranger.

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