Many collections of poetry pay lip service to grief but Jill Mceldowney’s debut full-length collection Otherlight from YesYes Books genuinely and ethically interrogates the passages of time, pain, survivor’s guilt, and commits to the exploration of the ruins of a life that could’ve been. On its surface, Otherlight is a navigation of grief and the trauma that lingers after unexpected loss. However, the book is much more than that. Otherlight is also a love story, wrapped up in the loss of the beloved, the loss of self, and the loss of expectations–of hope. There is no resolution to the grief that exists between these pages, which is part of the reason the book is so haunting.

Mceldowney’s poems fearlessly wind their way through the speaker’s self—crafted purgatory. The book opens with the stark declaration “I know it scares you when I say I’m not afraid to die.” Such an admission immediately captures the contemplative tone for not only the rest of the opening poem, but the rest of the book. Mceldowney astutely acknowledges the unease and concern a line like this might create and uses this to create a sense of tensions between the speaker’s internal thought and how the speaker is externally perceived. In many ways, Otherlight is a book that answers the question “what if I said the quiet part out-loud?”

Throughout the book, Mceldowney masterfully conveys the speaker’s yearning for connection and communication with the departed. She does this through precise and exact repetition. Most notably through the mention of “sleep” and “telephones.” Across the landscape of Otherlight, sleep serves as a window, a gateway between the world of the living and the world of the departed. The repetition of the ringing telephone echoes throughout the book, emphasizing a sense of desperation, the despair in the absence of response:

“And I never call but you answer anyway     Was it ever cheerful?     The sound called ringing     Don’t talk to me     please     don’t tell me I need you disoriented     buried alive     clawing your way up from the mouth of a cave to show me the way home and tell me     what does this even mean?”

As the book progress, the speaker grapples with unanswered questions such as these and how they feed into her overwhelming sense of guilt. Mceldowney is relentless in her questioning, interrogation of the speaker’s mind, their awareness and accountability for their actions–or in some cases lack of action. Particularly striking in this sense are Mceldowney’s Psychotherapy / Psychopharmacology poems in which she makes every use of the form to probe her speaker. These poems read as a back-and-forth dialogue between the doctor and the patient speaker. Otherlight takes this opportunity to ask the particularly tough questions, questions that may be better left unanswered: Does grief ever actually leave us? Is it okay to dread your whole life after the loss of a beloved? The poems strike a balance between vulnerability and inability to move on, a hesitation to heal. The speaker holds onto her loss like a lifeboat as if the idea of the beloved is more powerful and more important than the beloved themselves.

“What brings you here today?”

The official cause of death was overdose.
One of his brothers called to tell me.
I couldn’t understand over the sobbing

all I caught was “blood, salt, angels, brain floating,
do something to save us—”

The images of “blood, salt, angels, brain floating” are ethereal and chilling, underscoring the profound loss and finality of the beloved’s death. Some of the most fascinating, most keenly felt poems in the collection appear in the form of the serial “Otherlight” poems:

“—terrible to survive
and surviving is never over.

I keep hearing the sound
of a tree struck by lightning. The assignment

was to fall in love, love came to me
differently, directly,

did me no good, changed me
for the worse.

The world aches to say Weren’t you rescued?”

The titular poems carve the steps that lead the reader downward, deeper into the spiral of loss, the underworld’s mine amidst the corridors of salt and lithium that Mceldowney expertly carves for us. One of the jewels of the collection comes in the form of the poem “I’ll Love You Until the End of the World.”

“In this you,
there can be no aftermath.

Why can’t I stop
trying to prove love is more final than death?

The dead
don’t like to be alone.”

One of the most important through-lines of the book comes in the form of a love story. The beloved never actually appears in the text–is portrayed as a ghost, memory, nostalgia. Some of the most tender language appears in the poems is in the form of the “I Would Say” poems which build upon the conversations the speaker wishes she would’ve had if “the dead where still in the room.” These poems …to the poem “If the Dead were in the Room I Would Say” where the speaker laments her desire to hold onto the beloved forever, but also move on, out of grief.

“I’m sorry—
I promise I will talk to you every day,
I will answer
the telephone when it rings. I will write letters,
carve your name in the ice, stand in the rain, look always for your ghost—”

In this poem, Mceldowney explores the speaker’s internal struggle as they grapple with the concept of “moving on.” Talking to the dead becomes a cathartic means of processing emotion, seeking solace, and questioning the feasibility of continuing on a path without the departed beloved. Mceldowney does the masterful work of capturing the weight of their absence as well as pondering the significant of the relationship, and how to navigate a life that has been forever altered.
The final poems in the book offer a glimmer of hope–even as the speaker makes it clear that her speaker’s grief and guilt may never be fully absolved:

“Tomorrow will cool me with grey light, will wake me
with ice. My hands will not shake,
I will talk to my visions
my symptoms will steady me—
I won’t worry about how I might become someone
no one
could ever live through.

Otherlight offers a respite in the typical journey through grief. You will not find that here because there is no other side and there is no way through. This beautifully crafted debut accomplishes the rare feat of rewriting the map through grief, and tenderly, offers the suggestion that it is not something to run from, but rather something to embrace. Otherlight offers the tender suggestion that grief is not a place to be escaped from or something to get over, but a place of nostalgia can be a place of comfort, that the past, frozen in ice, is something to be preserved, cherished, not something to be forgotten.

Through raw imagery, unflinching explorations of guilt and unanswered questions, Mceldowney invites readers to grapple with the devastating consequences of such actions. Otherlight serves as a reminder of the profound impact of loss, the urgent need for empathy, and understanding in the face of human struggle.

Charlotte Roth is a reviewer and essayist who lives in North Carolina.