On the Other Side, Blue

Collier Nogues’ lyrical debut collection, On the Other Side, Blue, shows us a world steeped in loss and rich with the love that survives it. “If you think you’ll cry, love, let’s not both of us, not here,” Nogues writes as she explores how to endure grief—a grief that nestles into the hearts of these poems and refuses to leave. Everything in this collection exists in terms of its relationship to the deceased: “No one loves me like your mother, now that my mother’s gone.” The speaker, too, struggles with her identity in the wake of such grief: “Widow— //echo—//there is no proper name / for the daughter left without a mother.”