The Pilot Star Elegies

A National Book Award finalist for 1999.
The centerpiece of this collection, "Elegy for My Sister," is a sequence of poems on the suicide of the poet's sister in which he gathers, piece by piece, the scattered fragments of his sister's life. In other poems, Santos follows this elegiac theme into the broader contexts of myth and contemporary history to explore the ways each private loss is overlaid by those harrowing conditions by which our century defines itself.