One word I had throughout the first year and a half of my mother's death was 'unmoored.' I felt that I had no anchor, that I had no home in the world.

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

Our minds are mysterious; our conscious brain is like a ship on a sea that is obscure to us.

I think about my mother every day. But usually the thoughts are fleeting - she crosses my mind like a spring cardinal that flies past the edge of your eye: startling, luminous, lovely... gone.

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.

When my mother was sick, I found myself needing to put down in my journals all sorts of things - to try to understand them, and, I think, to try to remember them.

And after my mother's death I became more open to and empathetic about other people's struggles and losses.