Any Gesture

A braided, elegiac journey through death and recovery, Any Gesture takes on loss, anticipatory grief, and the little deaths experienced in the space between mourning and survival.

The collection's four narrative threads speak to a modern, suburban Ophelia; pre-elegize a sister on the brink of suicide; reconcile miscarriage and infertility; and question the proper care for the dead in the face of escalating and dehumanized losses. In these haunting, urgent poems, Whitney Koo interrogates the notion that death is a singular event. Here, grief is illuminated as a living thing, sometimes violent, sometimes hungry, sometimes a " long / drawn sucker punch." Through striking, vivid language, Koo reinvents the elegy as something past, present, future-- and we are both witness and mourner.