“More than elegy—and a poignant elegy it is—fretwork troubles the inconsistencies of inside and out, far and near. ‘Why measure only what you can see?’ asks Glazer. Reading, I felt very aware of language, as well as the gaps and breaks therein, and the desire we have to meet one another, here, in this world. Fiercely tender, these are poems I’ll turn to, again and again.”
—Sally Keith, author, River House

“Book by extraordinary book, Michele Glazer has been making language to enable deep attention. In fretwork she is at her most personal, most grief-stricken, most original, and most spare. Her father dies, her mother dies; but before they do they become disconcertingly unpredictable, unfamiliar. She brings us intimately close to that fraying, or, more precisely, she brings us close to how their unpredictability and unfamiliarity finally become clear enough to recognize. Silence is both her tool and her subject, what she cuts with and through in order to remain attentive. Each hard-won moment is part of the push and pull of a mind alert and flexible enough to move and leap and recalibrate as it needs to. This is superb writing, always precise, unpredictable, authentic to its searching, unnervingly alive. I love this book for all the ways in which it remains gobsmackingly present to real bewilderment, while inhabiting a receptivity continually reoriented by care.”
—Mary Szybist, author, Incarnadine