Any Gesture

A braided, elegiac journey through death and recovery, Any Gesture takes on loss, anticipatory grief, and the little deaths experienced in the space between mourning and survival.

The collection’ s four narrative threads speak to a modern, suburban Ophelia; pre-elegize a sister on the brink of suicide; reconcile miscarriage and infertility; and question the proper care for the dead in the face of escalating and dehumanized losses. In these haunting, urgent poems, Whitney Koo interrogates the notion that death is a singular event. Here, grief is illuminated as a living thing, sometimes violent, sometimes hungry, sometimes a “ long / drawn sucker punch.” Through striking, vivid language, Koo reinvents the elegy as something past, present, future— and we are both witness and mourner.