Gail Griffin Bücher

"Gail Griffin had only been married for four months when her husband's body was found in the Manistee River, just a few yards from their cabin door. The terrain of memoir is full of stories of grief, though Grief's Country: A Memoir in Pieces is less concerned with the biography of a love affair than with the lived phenomenon of grief itself-what it does to the mind, heart, and body; how it functions almost as an organism. The book's intimacy is at times nearly disarming; its honesty about struggling through grief's country is unfailing. The story is told "in pieces" in that it is ten essays of varying forms, punctuated by four original poems, that examine facets of traumatic grief, memory, and survival. While a reader will perceive a forward trajectory, the book resists anything like a clear chronology, offering a picture of deep grief as something that defies the linear and explodes time. "A Strong Brown God" tells the story of two of Griffin's significant relationships-with her husband, Bob, and with the Manistee River-and includes the history of what drew them all together. "Grief's Country" follows Griffin from the morning after Bob's death through the first disoriented, fractured months of PTSD. "Heartbreak Hotel" takes Griffin on a tragicomical flight the first Christmas after Bob's death to a Jamaican resort-which includes an unscheduled stop at Graceland-where she contemplates the notions of home and haven. Grief's Country will speak directly to anyone who has lost a dearly loved one, offering not one story but ten different faces of grief to contemplate. It will also appeal to general readers of memoir, including teachers and students of nonfiction, especially as it includes a variety of formal models. Those interested in the subject area of death and dying will find it useful as a book that bypasses recovery narratives, truisms, and "stages of grief" to get as close as possible to the experience itself"-- Provided by publisher

The narrative delves into the tragic events surrounding the deaths of two students at Kalamazoo College during Homecoming weekend in 1999. Through an intimate exploration, the author seeks to understand the motivations behind Neenef Odah's shocking act of violence against his ex-girlfriend, Maggie Wardle, and the subsequent impact on their close-knit community. This examination not only confronts the question of how such a tragedy could occur among seemingly normal individuals but also reflects on the broader implications for campus life and mental health.

Winner of the Two Sylvias Press Wilder Series Poetry Prize Gail Griffin's "Omena Bay Testament" takes us across landscapes of winter and water through the possibility of love and the tragedy of death to a ravishing moment where there is nothing left to want. An accomplished nonfiction writer, Griffin captures the fullness and limitations of being with remarkable depth and tenacity in her debut collection of poetry and prose. "I'm cloaked in the invisibility that comes to women at a certain point," she writes, and it is from that place of being off-stage where her narratives-harrowing, nuanced, layered-brilliantly forge a path between past and present, the living and the dead. I can't think of another book that gifts its readers with such a breadth of time and experience. Sweeping and seamless, Griffin shifts between wide and exacting gazes, from poems of quiet interiority to the larger breaking world, especially with her masterful sequence in response to news excerpts. This book is a life; it is a gift of integrity and lasting art. -Jennifer K. Sweeney