Title: When Death Takes Something from You Give It Back: Carl’s Book
Author: Naja Marie Aidt
Publication Date: September 3, 2019
Publisher: Coffee House Press
Format: Edelweiss eARC

I try to make an effort to read more poetry, and this year’s theme for me seems to be grief, as I struggle with my own.

What particularly spoke to me about Mrs. Aidt’s work is that this book was written as a way for her to come to terms with her own grief and as she learned to cope, and that in itself was appealing. Because grief is hard, yo. Everyone goes through it differently.

When Death Takes Something From You Give It Back is a heart-wrenching, but beautiful, exploration of the life and death of one young man and a mother’s journey to make sense of her loss.

There is so much emotion packed into this book. True, it’s an exploration of grief, but at the same time, it’s so much more than that. There’s laughter and love and celebration of a vibrant life and healing, bit by bit.

❧ Aidt writes with such ardent emotion and fervor that it was easy to take this emotional journey with her.

And what a journey it was. Phew. Yes, there’s a lot of pain in this book, but there’s plenty of other emotions, too. There were ups and downs and twists. It was really a roller coaster, and even though it was always destined to lead back to the grief, there were so many beautiful moments in between.

Aidt for sure doesn’t pull any punches with her writing. The book is raw and real and hits all the feels hard.

If grief, death, or loss might be a potential trigger for you, I wholeheartedly encourage you to skip this one. There were definitely times I ugly cried, but I’m in a good headspace, and if you’re not, this one can easily drag you down.

❧ I enjoyed the way Aidt played with structure and form and repetition to create a more engaging narrative.

I mean, that’s one of the great things about poetry, I think, is all the different things you can do with it. The book is mostly prose poetry, and Aidt does different things with formatting and punctuation to convey a more stream-of-conscious narrative at times.

One of my favorite things was the repetition around Carl’s actual death, and the way it unfolds little by little, devolving into a rushed, hurried, and heartrending experience.

Told in small italicized vignettes, the actual night of Carl’s death is interspersed between memories, and the scene is repeated little by little until the whole story comes to light and things move forward. There’s sometimes no punctuation or few punctuation, caps lock sentences, run-on sentences, all of which do a great job of conveying the anger, confusion, and frantic atmosphere.

❧ The majority of the book is written in prose poetry form, which is my personal favorite, but there is some free verse sprinkled in here and there.

If you’re going in expecting this to be a “typical” poetry book, it is not. The narrative here takes precedence over the idea of a bunch of single poems. The book is one massive poem, essentially, wrapping the smaller poems into the overall narrative.

❧ The book is written very stream of conscious, so it doesn’t follow a linear narrative, but jumps back and forth in the timeline of Carl’s life and death.

Whether or not this is effective really depends on your preferences. I thought it was extremely effective in some instances (like in revealing exactly how Carl died and coming to terms with the night it happened). There were times, though, that it became hard to follow and the jumping back and forth and small chunks were a bit jarring. It was a little hit or miss for me.

❧ Despite being an exploration of grief and coping with loss, the reader also finds Carl in these pages and gets an intimate look at who he was in life.

There are small vignettes about Carl growing up, the things he liked and thought and did, interspersed between his death and the mourning. It reads like a love letter from a mother to the son she lost, and there was a lot of beauty in that, I thought. It also really drives home Aidt’s pain and loss, contrasting this lively boy with a promising future ahead of him, which was cut tragically short.

❧ This is an incredibly personal journey the author undertakes (as it says in the title, this is Carl’s book), which means that sometimes the poetry can be very specific.

Whether this is a problem or not really depends on your preferences. For me, a work being so specific and so personal makes it harder to get into, because the author is talking, essentially, to her son. It makes me feel weird, like instead of being invited into the process, I’m spying on a profoundly personal and emotional moment between two people which I’m not really privy to. This created a weird sort of distance for me between myself and the work and made it really hard to get into.

❧ Aidt draws inspiration from other authors she’s read who have written on grief, and her text is dotted with quotes from other selections of work, which is fine … but that’s not really why I picked up this book.

Here and there would have been one thing, but it felt like there were so many references to other works that it made up a pretty hefty portion of the book. On the one hand, these were obviously sources that Aidt drew upon in her time of need as she struggled with her grief and are, therefore, a part of her narrative. But on the other, I wasn’t so much interested in all these asides and quotes from others, and it felt jarring and pulled me out of her story.

What are some good poetry books you’ve read this year?