Many grievers experience intense yearning or longing after a death - more than they experience, say, denial.

Many Americans don't mourn in public anymore - we don't wear black, we don't beat our chests and wail.

With ferocity and extraordinary craft, Lizzie Harris has made a book of poems that resonates far beyond the personal stories it tells. Stop Wanting reveals, in every lyric, its author's profound metaphorical gifts. In its ironies and intensities, it brings to mind a writer like the young Sylvia Plath, though what is startling about Harris' s work is the way it combines those gifts with a muted, deft self-awareness. Most of all, these are wonderfully shaped, powerful, and surprising poems-a startling debut.

My whole life, I had been taught to read and study, to seek understanding in knowledge of history, of cultures.

I think that grief is a profound spiritual, metaphysical, and - oddly - physical reckoning with death, which we don't understand well. It's both the process by which you relearn the world in the absence of someone who was a pillar in it, and the process in which you confront the reality of death.

This is part of the complexity of grief: A piece of you recognizes it is an extreme state, an altered state, yet a large part of you is entirely subject to its demands.

Grief is at once a public and a private experience. One's inner, inexpressible disruption cannot be fully realized in one's public persona.