Elegies on the death of the author’s parents.

The Grey Tote, Deena Kara Shaffer’s debut, is a collection of elegies on the death, in quick succession, of her father and mother. Scorning easy consolations, Shaffer’s poems are witty, epigrammatic, rhythmic, spiked with grief but ultimately dry-eyed “lessons in goodbye,” she calls them, “Sentences / cut.” In coming to grips with what to do “now that now/ has no them in it,” she has arrived at a book of poetry fiercer and truer than most written today.