THE BOOK OF JOHN

Royce offers an intimate poetry collection about coming to terms with a spouse’s death.

This heartbreaking book of poems is dedicated to John Kevin Bouldin, the author’s late husband, who died of cancer at age 56. A Gulf War veteran and outdoorsman with whom Royce fished and hiked, Bouldin “bristled / when too busy for his open-air sacraments” (“Friluftsliv”). But as “the tumor flares,” pain “stoops him, / doubles him like a folding chair” (“Two-Stepping to Chemo’s Beat”). During his illness, Royce prays for “small marvels” like “laughing at standup on Netflix, playing / with our dogs in snow-tromped fields, my husband’s / steak au poivre steeping the house / in peppercorn, butter, cognac” (“Portrait in Half-Light”).In the titular poem, Royce chastises God, writing, “I am the one who blessed him, / held water / to his withered lips. / Where were the keys to unlock your mercy?” As the one-year anniversary of Bouldin’s death comes and goes, Royce wonders, “Do I walk away, heart tight as a walnut— / or towards, which is really the same direction” (“God is the Fish in My Mouth”).Royce’s grief is both devastating and undeniably gorgeous in lines like, “My body, the mausoleum, / holds your life’s thousand photos / I have swallowed along with your opal soul” (“Where Do We Carry the Dead?”). The author is refreshingly forward in her ambivalence about faith and spirituality, wondering, “if a Godthing with mercy even exists” (“Two-Stepping to Chemo’s Beat”). Royce captures the nonsensical way grief works, connecting a cranberry tart with “the color of the body bag / zipped slowly over your perfect face” (“Bacon-Wrapped Dates and the Last Word”). This book is a brutal and beautiful remembrance, though perhaps a few more poems depicting a pre-cancer Bouldin would have provided a more well-rounded picture of this much-loved man.

A powerful and poignant tribute to the poet’s late husband.