Prageeta Sharma, _Grief Sequence_

MEMOIRS WRITTEN AROUND the loss of a husband has become a richly developed genre in the last decade or so--Joan Didion's Year of Magical Thinking, Joyce Carol Oates's A Widow's Story, Gjertrud Schnackenberg's Heavenly Questions. Since women tend to live longer than men, and since more women are publishing writers now than in eras past, the genre will probably keep growing.

Grief Sequence is largely linked prose poems about the death of Sharma's husband, the composer Dale Edwin Sherrard, of a cancer that came on abruptly and took him much sooner than his doctors had been expecting. 

Given the subject matter, it seems churlish to complain, but the book did not make a very deep impression on me, I have to say. Grief is hard--perhaps impossible--to be original about, as one of humanity's oldest experiences. Even so, some writers--Didion, in my opinion--do find a way to make its peculiar estrangements vivid and clear. That never quite happens here.