A review by laura_sackton
Blade by Blade by Danusha Laméris

Oh, this book is so lovely, so delicate, so open, so heartbreaking. I was so delighted by the flowing, ordinary, reverent, lyrical slowness of these poems. Though they are very different from Ada Limón and Mary Oliver and Ross Gay, I had a similar reaction to them that I have to reading those poets: a sense of a deep sinking into the world, a sense of rootedness and nowness, a sense of wonder and reverence, abiding love, an attention to colors, trees, sunsets, beloved hands, and always, always, everywhere, grief. The inextricable braiding of grief and love. 

Many of these poems are about the ongoing grief of the death of her brother and her young son. They are also about love, gardens, colors, domestic routines, the body. I’m having trouble explaining how gentle I found these poems, how soft. Not in a meaningless or shallow or simple way. No, what I mean is that these poems to me feel like waterfalls, clay mugs, well-woven cloth, a maple leaf: things so deeply themselves you can’t imagine them in another shape. Honest, direct, surprising, yes, but with such a tenderness toward the speaker, toward the ongoing and endless grief of living with loss and loving through it, too. I read this book slowly and found that a good way to enter it, because in some ways it felt easy, smooth, like honey, and in other ways piercing. 

“What doesn’t / in time enter grief’s lexicon?” 

“We cannot love the earth / without getting blood on our hands.”