Alterations

“This heartbreaking, unusual, and precise collection [Little Envelope of Earth Conditions] treats grief with all the complexity it deserves." 

—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

“This is a heart-breaking, beautiful book, yes. But also one in which grief lights the page, as the poet tells us: ‘What is grief but a syllable that accumulates / us of our gravity.’ Having known loss, what does she learn? What knowledge is shared here? Knowledge is in the questions. Winrock is a brilliant lyric poet who shares: all we say, we say in a body. Nothing can be said outside it. What is the lyric poet doing in this book? She grieves and sings. She whispers about mothers, about daughters, she composes elegies, pastorals. ‘Our bodies have been exposed to all sorts of things. // The stars don’t believe in weeping us / to sleep.’ This knowledge is desolate, but it frees us: ‘our bodies pinned open into the last kind blues.’ This is the last frontier: ‘Listen, listen— /every time I’ve tried to bring our baby back // to the ground in our old city.’ I love the duality of this voice. Its tenderness and its ringing grief.” 

—Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa