Stranger
(Book)

A mother's illness and early death is only the beginning of the story of Stranger, Laura Sims' second collection. This is the death whose presence and particulars are felt and inscribed, and which achieves an agency, a purview, a resistance. We feel the loss from all angles, even as Sims' episodic, quicksilver narrative moves up and through a mother's life and its incompletion, her apprehension in the face of death, a surviving child's guilt and the adult child's attempts at comprehension of who/what the mother is, now that she's gone. In the end there is a hopeful hopelessness in approaching Eternity. Laura Sims' delicacy and agility are equal to her forbearance, and all are up to the remarkable task of recounting a laife and afterlife.