“Heartbreaking and robust.” —PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

These are poems of absence. Written after the loss of her mother, River House follows Sally Keith as she makes her way through the depths of grief, navigating a world newly transfigured. Incorporating her travels abroad, her experience studying the neutral mask technique developed by Jacques Lecoq, and her return to the river house she and her mother often visited, the poet assembles a guide to survival in the face of seemingly insurmountable pain. Even in the dark, Keith finds the ways we can be “filled with this unexpected feeling of living.”

River House is a profound new collection from one of the most prominent young poets at work today, addressing death, art, travel, and beauty—finding, in mourning, what it means to survive.