Grief Bone

Author: Karla Huston

Publisher: Five Oaks Press (2017)

“In one of the poems in her profoundly moving collection Grief Bone, Karla Huston writes about the ‘search for the one word/that is more prayer than prize.’ In these powerful poems about love, loss, grief, fear, violence, and the search for serenity, she finds that one word again and again. These poems are prayers that we can prize.”

–David Jauss

“With language both masterful and lyrical, Huston’s poems give us loss and grief, verging seamlessly into phobia, nightmare, blood. Between these covers is ‘bludgeon with a burst of bloom/on the side.’ The result is at once unsettling and too familiar, a little like looking into a tarnished mirror, the view distorted by ‘ripple/scar and story.’ And reader, there is beauty to be found there, too.”

–Sarah Sadie

“What I like about Karla Huston's Grief Bone is the way the poems move between comfort and unease. Grounded in the grit of the ordinary and yet somehow unmoored, her subjects and characters are often darkly humorous and unsettling.”

–Dorianne Laux