Recharting

In Recharting the Way Back, Stacey Walker maps the territory of grief through intimate coordinates: a grandfather clock keeping vigil, pressed flowers between dictionary pages, a father's cologne bottled in amber, a childhood home seven doors away. Written in the year following the deaths of both parents—nineteen days in January, six days in November—these poems explore how we navigate loss when our primary cartographers are gone. Through pandemic card games, nursing home art, and daily detours around memory, Walker charts how ordinary objects become sacred artifacts as we find our way through the after.