NOBODY TOLD ME

Nobody told me that losing both parents would unmoor me so completely. Nobody told me grief would show up at the grocery store, on a Tuesday, during a commercial. Written in 21 days following her father’s death, S. M. Barnes takes readers through the immediate aftermath of losing both parents within eighteen months. These poems don’t offer comfort or closure—they offer permission. Permission to laugh at a funeral, to feel nothing, to feel everything, to have complicated relationships with the people you’re supposed to love. This is not a book about healing. This is a book about surviving—and choosing to stay alive anyway.