First Official Book Review for We the Mourners! FIVE STARS

Super thank you to the Literary Titan family for reading and reviewing We the Mourners!

Here is the full five-star review! LINK HERE FOR MORE REVIEWS OF OTHER BOOKS!

We the Mourners, by Vanessa Shields, is a poetry collection about grief, love, embodiment, and the strange communal work of surviving loss. Built around the repeated phrase “We the mourners,” the book moves like a chant through sorrow’s many rooms: the body as tombstone, grief as food, loneliness as yarn, trauma as a kitchen, memory as something stitched into the living. It’s less a narrative than a ritual, a long lyric procession that insists mourning isn’t passive. It roams, cooks, protects, questions, rages, receives, and eventually releases.

Shields doesn’t write grief as an abstract ache floating somewhere above the head. She drags it into the ribs, throat, hips, tongue, blood, skin. I felt that especially in the poems where mourners “eat grief for every meal” or “crawl in the knotty-nooks” of loneliness. Those images are strange, almost unruly, but they work because grief is strange and unruly too. The collection understands that sorrow can be grotesque and tender in the same breath. I loved the way the poems keep returning to Love with a capital L, not as a soft greeting-card sentiment, but as a force with teeth, appetite, memory, and weather inside it.

The writing is lush and I admired its nerve. Shields has a taste for abundance, for alliteration, compression, body-language, and sudden verbal inventions like “Love-net” and “humanuscripts.” At its best, that language feels alive on the tongue, full of heat and pulse. Even when the language gets crowded, it’s crowded with conviction. The ideas stay compelling: grief as shared labor, the body as sacred witness, creativity as resistance, the earth’s suffering as inseparable from our own, and mourning as a form of radical attention.

It’s a book that doesn’t tidy sorrow into lessons, which I appreciated; instead, it makes a place for suffering to be seen without shame. The final movement, with its request that when we break our “feet turn to lungs,” left me with the sense that Shields is asking readers to let pain become breath, not because pain is beautiful, but because being witnessed inside it can be. This is a fierce, generous, bodily collection, and I’d recommend it to readers who like spiritual, emotionally saturated poetry about grief, healing, and love’s difficult, luminous endurance.

TO PURCHASE A COPY OF WE THE MOURNERS, PLEASE EMAIL ME! shieldsvanessa@gmail.com. The cost $20. Payments made by etransfer or cash! Same email for etransfer!