If I allow myself to sit with the feeling, to name what comes after losing someone to suicide, my thoughts, as always, drift to metaphor; I imagine the sea floor: tectonic plates converging unseen, a quake in the very earth itself displacing billions of gallons of ocean and anything else that lives.
The tsunami that often follows is grief.
Sometimes there are foreshocks; the water pulls back into itself and you know—the tsunami is impending, inevitable.
Sometimes, like in Joan Kwon Glass’s debut full-length poetry collection, Night Swim, winner of the 2021 Diode Poetry Prize, we find ourselves swept out to sea on a wave we never even knew was coming.
In this lyrical poetry collection, readers share in the tragedy of the speaker’s eleven-year-old nephew, Frankie, dying by suicide and his mother, Julia, the speaker’s younger sister, following two months later. Glass expertly uses structure, a thing sorely craved by and missing among those in the wake of suicide, to create a manuscript that teaches as effectively as it devastates.
In the book’s titular poem, and the first in the collection, the speaker introduces readers to being an expat, a person living outside their native country, to their new home—grief. Glass relates this uncanny feeling through a lost swimmer on the border of North and South Korea:
In an attempt to make sense of the unfathomable, Glass classifies this new home, this “strange country,” by organizing her poems into sections titled after the five stages of grief: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance.
In the first section, “Denial,” readers are immersed immediately into the speaker’s mourning, after losing Frankie, with the poem “How to Pray After Suicide”:
In the same section, we’re introduced to Julia in “Exit Wound”:
There is little transition in the “Denial” section between Frankie’s and Julia’s deaths, mimicking the utter cataclysm of two suicides so close together.
We are transported to the sister’s death with the poem, “First Viewing”:
The last poem in “Denial,” titled “First Sunrise,” shows the speaker at her teaching job, surrounded by her coworkers. She is forced, for the first, but never the last time, to live as if time has not stopped just hours after her nephew’s death:
“First Sunrise” haunts readers because we know that where denial ends, the journey of living with it begins.
In this strange, new country, grief refuses to play by the rules of time and space; it is—perhaps forever—inextricably interlaced. After “Denial,” poems are separated within each individual state of grief, but they are not linear. Within each section, poems may jump back and forth in time from before, to during, to after—to years after. Poems featuring the speaker’s childhood memories with her sister and memories of her nephew visiting are now shaded by what will happen.
In the section titled “Anger,” the first poem, “Asking for Help,” is in the epistolary-style and situates us backwards in time to before the nephew’s death, reinforcing the concept that grief works retroactively. Here, readers are let in on what steps were not taken to help the speaker’s nephew when he was showing he needed help:
In the beginning of Night Swim, Glass quotes Harvard Health (Harvard Health Publishing 2019):
Every year in the United States, more than 45,000 people take their own lives. Every one of these deaths leaves an estimated six or more “suicide survivors” — people who’ve lost someone they care about deeply and are left with their grief and struggle to understand why it happened.
My much-beloved uncle has been gone fourteen years this past March, taken from us in a way very much like Frankie was. One of my sons is named after him. Another one of my sons is eleven years old and struggles with depression and anxiety; it is a family heirloom.
Recently, after we had gone through a hard, life-altering experience, I took the speaker’s advice and before anything, I told my son, I can see you are in pain. I am not angry at you. I will do whatever I can to help you. Then, as the speaker implored her sister, I followed through. I know now that eleven is not too young.
Night Swim is a poetry collection that is objectively stunning. I expect that more awards will follow. Joan Kwon Glass’ talent is undeniable.
But even more importantly, I believe it to be transcendent. This collection—filled with such love, such regret, such hope, through this aching retelling—will save lives. ◆