A Buyer's Guide to the Afterlife maps the overlapping territories of motherhood and mourning, devotion and doubt, natural history and personal catastrophe, in a world that refuses to hold still. In this stunning collection, Wright's genius lies in her juxtapositions and tonal swerves: a woman wakes in a coffin and decides to stay, the Navy studies sharks to build better ships, veins surface like submarines. Anchoring the collection's wide-ranging scope, the "Inventory" poems serve as the collection's temporal spine, marking the years of miscarriage, pregnancy, and early motherhood. Each catalogs what accrues against erasure. Where does personal grief end and historical grief begin? Where do the body's animal vulnerabilities meet an era of mass extinction? Wright finds no answer, only the ongoing work of accounting--a ledger that refuses to balance. Yet the poems resist despair, carrying an insistent, even defiant joy, as likely to argue with the divine as to celebrate what remains green and growing. These triumphant and deeply wrought poems insist: we are animals who love. Who grieve.

Who plant beans in dangerous heat and call it hope. --Charlotte Pence, author of Many Small Fires and Code.