Rachel Eliza Griffiths on the Rhythms of Grief

At Poets & Writers, Rachel Eliza Griffiths describes the challenges she faced writing her new book of poetry, Seeing the Body, which follows her as she mourns the death of her mother. “The uneven rhythms of grief don’t allow you to do or to feel life as you did before,” Griffiths says. “Even the writer you were before is altered. It’s unquantifiable. Losing my mother forced me into the most difficult transformation of my life. Each poem drew me further into something I didn’t want to accept, which was that my mother was dead. Slowly, I understood that I also needed to put a lot of things in my life that frightened me to rest so that I could hear my own voice.”