Night in My Mourning Dress, by Shannon St. Armand

Poetry, chapbook, 36 pages, from Bottlecap Features. Night in My Mourning Dress enters into grief as it unfolds in everyday life. Mourning here is expressed not in the abstract or theoretical but in the smallness of what can be held in the hand. In these poems, the loneliness of grief becomes something almost physical, a place to commune with the self, others and the divine. In a world moving too fast to vulnerably admit pain, these vivid snapshots lift up a cry for the burdens each of us must carry alone, but that intimately connect us all. In this book, hope and despair, closeness and separation, fury and affection, exist in harmony—and shimmer with the conviction that there is not only light at the far end, but right in the midst. Shannon St. Armand lives in the Pennsylvania town in which she grew up and writes poetry in-between read alouds, big feelings and forest walks with her four small, tornado children. She loves black tea, her husband’s laugh and the rain. Some of her poems have appeared in Relief Journal, Dappled Things and Appalachian Review.