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.

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

Writing has always been the primary way I make sense of the world.

'Hamlet' is the best description of grief I've read because it dramatizes grief rather than merely describing it.

I'm not much like my mother; that role falls to my brothers, who have more of her blithe and freewheeling spirit.

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

Nothing prepared me for the loss of my mother. Even knowing that she would die did not prepare me.