Prageeta Sharma’s Grief Sequence opens in the long aftermath of a loss, in grief’s viscosity, which seems to choke out every poem it encounters. The grieving process — looking, not looking, feeling, not feeling, hearing, not hearing — has become a string of aesthetic encounters, together with refusals to encounter, that risks exhausting itself.
Prageeta Sharma’s Grief Sequence opens in the long aftermath of a loss, in grief’s viscosity, which seems to choke out every poem it encounters. The grieving process — looking, not looking, feeling, not feeling, hearing, not hearing — has become a string of aesthetic encounters, together with refusals to encounter, that risks exhausting itself. At the hospice, where her husband will soon die from esophageal cancer, Sharma recalls wanting to know “the tools and methods poets and artists had to say goodbye.”[1] It doesn’t matter, she decides.
