Ashes Are Bone and Dust

Lyric and elegiac poetry that maps the way through grief and recovery from well-known poet Jill Battson.
Jill Battson, whose first book of poems, 'Hard Candy', shook the poetry establishment by its well-starched neck, is back with a second breathtaking collection of lyric and elegiac poems. These are poems that are not afraid to name real people and real places, poems that revel in the relationships that make our lives, in the end, worth living. The book maps the way through grief and recovery. The poems – sensual, disturbing and probing – document Battson's parents' death and the aftermath that loss leaves behind. They also address the process of recovery, pulling heavily on the journey for discovery both tangible and emotional. Battson's poems are raw and beautiful, difficult and flowing, intensely evocative and imbued with the language and imagery of sex.