Good Grief

Stevie Edwards' debut book of poetry, Good Grief, catalogues her elegantly-wrought misadventures as a freshly-graduated, Michigan transplant stumbling over foal legs through Chicago and kneeling down to confront the wreckage of her skinned knees. Whether stopping to disinter some small ruin of a secondhand-clothes childhood, charting the reaches of her own privilege as a white woman in Chicago, or trying to recollect the reasoning behind last night's bar receipts, Stevie's voice -- a treble, equal parts angst and grace -- rumbles deep down in the belly of her poems, and lingers.