The Boy Who Slept Under the Stars

Roseann Lloyd's new poetry collection takes us on a sister's unflinching exploration into grief for a brother lost on a solo hike in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in northern Minnesota. His clothes are found but not his body. How does one mourn without a body? This absence calls up memories of his life and mixed emotions; it evokes other disappearances-children missing in Iraq, climbers lost on Everest, a college student drowned. Even though I've said, for two years now, I don't need his body to do my mourning, I'm suddenly desperate to touch your arms, muscled and tan…Full of verbal energy and rich patterns of sound, Lloyd's lines are allowed to breathe and move about in always interesting forms: prose poems, found poems, section poems, swirling mosaics of time and place. Beautifully crafted, the poems are emotionally complex yet accessible.