After Image: Poems

George’s debut collection, The Dream of Reason, remains one of the more overlooked poetry projects of the past decade, a gently arcadian head nod toward Louise Glück, surveying the natural world’s aches, idylls, and especially animals. This sophomore effort is a more resolutely gutting affair, its title referring to the grief that clouds every experience in the aftermath of loss, the collection rife with any number of absolutely pummeling expressions of how such pain manifests: “Everywhere I looked / I saw a body’s helplessness, its need to lie on the earth.” George further emphasizes this sense of life interrupted by grief’s insistence on the present in her use of language, certain words and images recycled and repurposed across poems—“snow” suffocates, “crows” portend, “fruit” and “spring” hope for resurrection. “Eurydice” also pointedly haunts these pages, balanced by the character “Jenny George”—those who are gone, those who remain. But as the poet confesses, George’s “words are just images gleaned off a dying girl like an apple peel pared in a slow spiral off an apple.” George suggests that perhaps all readers can do in the face of grief is to find the fruit in the spiral.