Most books of poetry inspire me in ways I can’t anticipate. And it’s not just that I’m inspired in my own creative process, although that usually does happen when I read a book of poetry. It’s that something inside me is stirred, something so deep inside myself that almost nothing else can reach it. It’s a truly spiritual, divine experience that reminds me greatly of how I have sometimes felt when reading the Bible or attending church. An amazing playwrite named Gill Dennis was the first person to articulate what I felt this was: he said that writing is a lot like prayer because it’s something we do that gets us through the tragedy of our own life. Poetry has always felt like prayer for me, and when I read a book of poetry, I almost always feel as though I’m accessing something divine inside myself.

This book of poetry continued that experience, but it also went even deeper. Most of the poems in this collection are written in the style of obituaries (hence the title of the book). In them, the speaker reminisces and reflects and ruminates on what it was like to lose her mother to cancer, and to watch her father’s mental health breakdown entirely. It’s a book that summersaults through all the intricacies of grief, reminding the reader at every point that grief is everlasting. Each poem, each obituary, feels like a prayer the speaker utters to connect to the parts of her that have died with her parents, as well as the parts of her that wish they had died with her parents, but must still live. It’s as though these poems pray to the grief she’s feeling, as well as pray through it. And the reader prays these prayers with the speaker.

But more than that, as the speaker prays through grief and dreams herself into the days and months surrounding the deaths of her mother and father, as the reader, I felt as though I was praying and dreaming myself beyond my own experience with grief and into a kind of collection pond. I was inspired at several points to write my own poems in response to something from what I read, and as I did, I felt keenly that my grief wasn’t the only grief I was accessing or dreaming myself into. I was writing about my own losses, but inside each memory, each line I wrote, was the weighted breath of something connected to me that wasn’t me. I don’t know how else to explain it, but it was like I was suddenly lifting my own prayer into a chorus of other prayers. But rather than drown out my voice, the chorus only heightened it, made it louder, heavier, filled it with different dimensions. Instead of praying into a kind of void, I was praying into a place where grief is allowed to simply be, and in this place, my grief was seen and felt by all the other praying voices.

I don’t know that I have ever encountered this in a poetry collection before. As I said, I’m almost always inspired by the books of poetry I read, and part of this is because the poems I read cause me to reflect inward. I read as much poetry as I do because reading poetry means that I will also write poetry. It’s like an overflowing creative investment: the more poetry I read, the more poetry I write. Usually, this process causes me to look inward and see my own grief, my own loss, my own life in a different way than I had before, and this book definitely made me do that, too. But in doing that, this book urged me to look beyond myself and see the greater sea of human experience. It was like a magnifying glass that made me look at my own grief so closely that I could see how many other griefs from other people lived inside my own. It was truly remarkable. I’m still whirling from it because this is exactly what poetry does: it connects us in ways that nothing else can. I’ve just never seen it connect like this before.

The writing in this book is absolutely stunning. I must have written six poems or so in response to specific sections. Chang has a way with images of grief that pluck at some of the most tender and sensitive parts of our own hurts and losses. The way she describes losing her mother and father, the nuance of loss and the complicatedness of parent-child relationships, and how those complications impact our grief, is raw, honest, and at times almost too heavy to read. And the ways in which she accesses these truths is creative, unique, and visceral. I highly recommend this book to anyone trying to write about grief. It will change how you see yourself, and it will change how you see the world.