The cedar grove and other sorrows

Jacob Robert Stephens
Wed, 29 Apr 2026 13:46:33 PDT

"The Cedar Grove and Other Sorrows chronicles a rural community in western Montana after the deaths of several young men from the town of Stick. Through epistolary, elegaic, and narrative poems, a web of characters address the dead and engage each other in ways that reveal consequences of loss. The sorrows involved are many, but those affected must go on. The accounts are varied, from a tragic drowning and severed friendships to the grief endured by parents outliving their children. Driving the collection is the recapitulation of a failed love affair, which requires of its participants perhaps a similar recognition as those confronting the dead: the awareness of one's life without the other"--Leaf iii