‘With this moving free verse arising from his sustained encounter with his wife’s cancer, Richard Bell lays bare the intimate reality of loss, from its dark foreshadowing in her fatal diagnosis through the rigors of her treatment to the persistence of her presence even in the yawning absence that followed her death. In raw honesty and occasional buffering irony, with unconventional images that startle the reader into fresh acts of perception, this poetry illuminates an intimate journey that touched me with both its universality for all mortal beings and with the ultimate particularity that distinguishes each shared life from all others. I recommend it to all of those who stand in the shadow of loss, as well as to readers who seek a deeper understanding of those who do.’ - Robert A. Neimeyer, author of Techniques of Grief Therapy, The Art of Longing, and Rainbow in the Stone