The Return of What's Been Lost

’s fourteen stories and fourteen “choral” poems mediate on loss, personal and cultural, and on how mourning embodies in the self, incarnate and haunting, the hugeness of what is missing. The book begins during the Second World War, moves into the years immediately after it, enters into the era of Vietnam and later the AIDs epidemic, and ends with the wars in Iraq. Not all losses are absolute; joy also returns. In the story, “Return of the Fallen,” Paul Lassiter thinks, “How much the dead must miss us to imprint their lives on ours.” David Morris