Litany of Thanks [Paperback]

In this moving book of elegies, the dead mingle with the living. Multiple narratives weave themselves together in these poems, like streams running downhill outside the rooms of human ghosts. Aleshire writes of a loved (lost) one: Do you expect me/ to lead? You turned to me once on the highway,/ hiking from the stranded plane.// I did, I do--I don't know how/ to answer absence, except by this/ attachment to the tangible, or: desire.

JOAN ALESHIRE was born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland. She graduated from Harvard/Radcliffe and received her Master of Fine Arts from Goddard College in 1980. She has taught in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College since 1983, and has published three books of poems: Cloud Train (Texas Tech Press, AWP Awards Series, 1982), This Far (Quarterly Review of Literature, 1987), and The Yellow Transparents (Four Way Books, 1997). She lives in Shrewsbury, Vermont.

I. Knocks on Marble 5 (Day at Zero) 6 Funeral Fan 7 What Stunned 8 (Day At Zero) 10 WIld Sky 11 A Stranger and a Poor Man 13 The Wanderer 15 Flood of Our Time 17 (Day at Zero) 19 Days of Our Recklessness, 1960 20 Always 22 II. Up To 25 Wide-Eyed Look 26 (Day at Zero) 28 Trainyard 29 Tete a Tete 31 (Day at Zero) 33 Do You Miss Me? 34 Light in the Desert 36 (Day at Zero) 38 Your Feet 39 What You Wish For 40 The God of Fire 42 (Day at Zero) 43 Great Portraits 44 III. First steps in teh afterlife 49 (Day at Zero) 51 Dia de los Muertos 52 The Lost 53 Scapegoat, Winter Solstice 55 Stories We Tell Ourselves 57 (Day at Zero) 64 The Dead 65 Once More for Orpheus & Euridyce 66 IV. Yellow Transparents: Reprise 71 Memorial Days 73 (Day at Zero) 74 After All 75 Litany of Thanks 77 Owner, End of the Night 78 Visit 80 (Day at Zero) 82 Late Summer, Late 83 Wonderful World 84 Watching Moonlight 86 (Day at Zero) 88