Patricia Cumming was one of the seven founders of Alice James Books, and published Afterwards in 1974 and Letter from an Outlying Province in 1976. She was then teaching at MIT (which contributed typesetting and let us use their printing press) and has since taught at Bard, U. Mass. Boston, Sarah Lawrence and Wheaton. She is now retired and working on a memoir told as fiction called Disentangling. She has published one story in the South Carolina Review and many poems in various journals.

These are poems about death, about remembering people who have died. They are for those who must mourn:

“To have said one thing
clearly
could have been a reason
to endure.”