Grief is the Only Thing that Flies

As Juliana Spahr suggests eco-poets ought do, Wetherington includes a bulldozer when she mentions a bird: there is mourning paired with wit, compassion with rage. This book of epistles and mistranslations, built utterly of the moment— and created out of hope, intimacy, inclusivity, and radical plans for loving and bettering the world— is exactly the remedy needed when things feel (as they often do right now) dire. “I am so lonesome I could split,” Wetherington writes, but at its enormous heart, Grief is the Only Thing that Flies is a book of companionships real and imagined, bruised, and bountiful, complicit and queer and complex. It will keep you good company. —Poet Arielle Greenberg