Any gesture: A collection of poems with a critical introduction

Any Gesture follows a female speaker’s journey through death, loss, and the anxieties of survival. Comprised of four narrative threads, the speaker grapples with the memories of the witnessed death of a teenage girl from childhood, pre-mourns a sister on the brink of suicide, reconciles with miscarriage and infertility, and struggles to mourn the mass deaths experienced as a result of gun violence in America. The collection interrogates the notion that death is a singular event, as well as how to properly care for the dead in the face of escalating and dehumanized losses. Any Gesture responds to the literary tradition of the elegy and to contemporary mourning practices to question the conditions for mourning, occasions for mourning, and the degree to which grief affects an individual’s psychological and physical well-being over time.