All of us suffer personal crisis. It may be a death, divorce, job loss or other financial crisis, a broken love relationship, or an illness--any painful experience that forces us to re-examine and change our lives so that our grief can be overcome and new happiness be found.

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...