SISTER IN A DIFFERENT MOVIE

Foley explores family, grief, and loss in this poetry collection.

The primary guiding characteristic of Foley’s collection is that the book alternates between different periods of the author’s life and varying degrees of closeness with her three sisters. In “Prism,” Foley describes a family of four girls helmed by a veteran father, “his nerves still raw / from four years as prisoner of war, / his wounds still glistening, / red as raspberries.” “A Gated Community” recalls her estranged sister Claire’s death in a bathtub left running, which “wept through / the neighbor’s wall.” “Now the Repairman,” “My Uninvestigated Sister,” and “Whispering Death” grapple with the practical and legal aftermath of that death, including household repairs, neighbors filing suit over flood damage, and unanswered questions about a bloody sink in her sister’s Texas town home. “A Zoom Memorial” captures the sisters’ distinct personalities via their squares on the screen. In “No Headstone,” Foley honors Claire by placing her ashes near a maple tree while also revisiting the loss of Foley’s parents and how each returned to the Earth: her mother through burial and her father via ashes scattered in New York Harbor. “Claire,” the penultimate poem in the collection, leaves readers with a haunting note: The poet is in a seaside home, sensing her sister in the moonlight and noticing how grief still “stuns me with an ache / I can’t undo.” Foley deftly captures the way loss can infiltrate and completely take hold of one’s life. The book’s cyclical return to Claire’s death mimics post-traumatic flashbacks, and the poet’s struggle to adapt to life after loss is relatable in lines like “I can’t tell when I’ll be my own again— // when words will mean what they once meant.” Though the collection is mostly somber, entries like “Poem to My Fallopian Tube” and “Letter to Squirrel, in Time of War” temporarily lighten the mood. A few poems, however, delve into global unrest and thus feel out of place, given the family theme.

A bittersweet poetic journey that occasionally strays too far from home.