Grieving Hope

Grieving Hope is a moving and at times fiery take on death, morality, love, and friendship. These five writers tell their unique stories of loss, love, and understanding with evocative and powerful writing. It is brave work.

–Maureen Aitken, author of The Patron Saint of Lost Girls

Five exquisite chapbooks make up Grieving Hope. Like the windows of a house, they provide distinct glimpses of the forms grief may take, from yearning’s sweetness and the terrible poignancy of too-late to ache’s persistence, regret, guilt, and blame. And yet, despite loss’s varied guise across these pieces, its aspects invariably ring true. They’re familiar. Perhaps that is why this collection proves so moving. The reader can recognize its ragged feelings: shapeshifting grief, gnawing missing. The hurt that haunts. The lastingness of sorrow.

–Melissa Ostrom, author of Unleaving

Grieving Hope is a journey into loss. We see families split, relationships broken, a ravished planet, the dementia-induced dissolution of a mind, and the attempted erasure of a culture. These journeys are painful, yet there is also shine in the crisp prose. And, yes, there is hope too. One piece ends: And try befriending hope and happiness. And keep writing too. Read this collection and seek out more from these extraordinary writers.

–François Bereaud, author of San Diego Stories

This anthology of five powerful chapbooks explores the delicate threads of memory, loss, and transformation. Through raw honesty and evocative prose, each author invites us to reflect on the moments that shape us, from childhood innocence to the painful reckonings of adulthood. Grieving Hope is a moving exploration of the weight and beauty of the past and how we find healing in its echoes.

–Casey Mulligan Walsh, author of The Full Catastrophe: All I Ever Wanted, Everything I Feared

Grieving Hope is a lyric exploration of how we survive and who we become after parts of us have been taken away. The five authors of this chapbook have created deftly drawn, sensory worlds of longing; an homage to what can no longer be. This collection honors absence for the shape it leaves within us, wraps the reader in words that pulse and ignite, and illuminates our most solitary moments.

–Ronit Plank, author of When She Comes Back

Grief is unpredictable; it comes in many shapes and leaves permanent marks. In its face, hope is almost an act of rebellion. Yet hope germinates within the cracks inflicted by grief. Grieving Hope is a brave reminder that the human experience is incomplete otherwise. Each writer succinctly explores grief through narratives that feel personal. The reader is left with several emotions and the aftertaste of hope. In a world causing grief in more ways than one, when Andy Dufresne’s words from The Shawshank Redemption about hope being “maybe the best of things” begin to fade from collective memory, may Grieving Hope reignite the beacon for those still lost at sea.

–Tejaswinee Roychowdhury and Ankit Raj Ojha, Editors, The Hooghly Review