Quit

Poetry. Women’s Studies. Taut lines—fragments from a journal? a report on hospice work? —seem to keep moving out of our grasp while at the same time bringing us closer to their subject, the elusive experience of the dying and their nurses. A grief worker at a hospice ponders how ordinary human failings: jealousy, fear, rigidity, the hunger of loneliness can overwhelm rewarding work. To the point of envying the dead for leaving it all behind. And yet how anything, even a lousy sandwich, can recall us to the pleasures of this world.