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

A death from a long illness is very different from a sudden death. It gives you time to say goodbye and time to adjust to the idea that the beloved will not be with you anymore.

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

To mourn is to wonder at the strangeness that grief is not written all over your face in bruised hieroglyphics. And it's also to feel, quite powerfully, that you're not allowed to descend into the deepest fathom of your grief - that to do so would be taboo somehow.

But when my mother died, I found that I did not believe that she was 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.

Funerals cost so much money, and are likely to be an additional source of stress in this recession - it's sad that we don't have a more humane, less commercialized way to approach burial.