Upkeep

The poems in Sara London’s Upkeep offer a guidebook for both coping with and negotiating the difficult terrain of life after great personal loss. In the book’s opening section, the speaker explains to a Martian the ways we earthlings attempt to raise our dead– you’ll find that with dreams // we exhume our dead without the mess /of upturned dirt –and later finds comfort in objects that connect her to her late Mr. Fix-It father. These are elegies whose solemnity has been upended by humor and the nuanced interrogations of the daily rituals that heal us. How do you / do it, start the experiment– / gas up, each day, anew? she asks. Oatmeal and duct tape help, London suggests, but ultimately the heart decides: The old tubes, they play on.