Poetry. She was the golden girl and twenty. A year later she was dead, and by her own hand. The young woman's father called Louis with the news, he, a college boyfriend. The next day she could not get out of bed, could not get dressed. Over the next months a tetraptych emerged. She came skittering across the road like a water bird.... The sun behind her the paler star. Like being thrown off axis by a quake, Louis was derailed. She set aside her novel and turned to poetry. A daughter must tell her mother she will die; a man at the height of his creative powers is killed in a freak accident; an American icon is painted in a chiaroscuro as uncompromising as a Rembrandt. The title poem steps back to explore the many ways in which we grieve, while Louis's meditation on her own mortality gives apt and inevitable conclusion. Candid, annealed with precision, these poems haunt and invite revisitation.

Laura Glen Louis is the author of Talking in the Dark, a Barnes & Noble Discover book, and recipient of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize for short fiction. Laura Glen Louis has had work included in Best American Short Stories. SOME, LIKE ELEPHANTS is her first book of poems.

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