Necklace of Bees

With a quirky poignance, Dannye Romine Powell's third collection probes the nature of loss—loss that's actual and loss that's feared. In these poems, loss takes many guises. With its ferny breath, loss is sometimes the lover who waits in secret on the porch. Sometimes even loss recognizes the feeling of loss and "calls the cops / to say his best friend / went fishing and won't answer his phone." Often, the poet mourns a loss of innocence, as when she learns, after attending the funeral of a friend, that the dead woman's husband has a history of infidelity. There's also the loss of romantic love, as when the woman "pulls / toward shore, a shore she calls by a name / she swore she'd never breathe again."