"Longing itself is nothing but the heart's open spaces," writes Mari L'Esperance. And in the open spaces at the heart of these poems is a mother who has disappeared. In a world of war and displacement, illness of the mind and body, imprisonment and violence both historical and personal, the poet leads her readers through a landscape of loss. In unadorned language, she draws readers into the interplay between articulation and silence--and finally offers a vision of redemption.

Acknowledgments

fog : memory

1.

The Bush Warbler Laments to the Woodcutter

After Reading of the Expatriate Writer's Death by Shipwreck: Margaret Fuller, 1850

In the Valley of the Kings

Stroke

Something Coming Apart

Kamakura

Returning to Earth

The Doll Maker

Pantoum of the Blind Cambodian Women

Another History

Diagnosis

Trio

Prayer

2.

The Last Time I Saw Her

The Search

Trying to Carry It

The Shoes

Caught

Where the Body Might Be, the Mind Follows--

Dark House

Beyond It

Finding My Mother

Forgetting

To Her Body

The Book of Ash

Grief Is Deep Green

For My Mother's Birthday

White Hydrangeas as a Way Back to the Self

3.

Begin Here

What's Possible

After Fire

Two Maples

This Hour Passing

To My Father, Living for a Long Time in Another Country

The Choices Not Made

Last Hour With His Dead Wife

Longing

Map of the World

Happiness and Happenstance Share the Same Root

Epistle

The Night Garden

How It Happens

Nocturne

As Told by Three Rivers

Notes

Mari L'Esperance is a graduate of the Creative Writing Program at New York University, where she was a New York Times Company Foundation Creative Writing Fellow. Her earlier poetry collection Begin Here was awarded a Sarasota Poetry Theatre Press Chapbook Prize. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in several print and online journals and anthologies, including Beloit Poetry Journal, Many Mountains Moving, Poetry Kanto, Prairie Schooner, and Salamander. L'Esperance's honors include two Pushcart Prize nominations and residency fellowships from Hedgebrook and Dorland Mountain Arts Colony. She lives and writes in the San Francisco Bay Area.