I enjoyed many of the author's poems, but several featured a little more booze, cigarettes, and cursing than my comfort level tolerates. ( )

Song of the Closing Doors begins with the cancer diagnosis of the author’s friend and memories of their their youth when they were in love with the world, oblivious that it might end. Phillips recalls when they were seventeen, “in that year when all/we ever did is play.”

A few poems later, his sister discovers a dog’s leash in a coat pocket and cries. “Death is a god/damned thief.”

I think of my peers who have passed, friends lost early to disease or accident. Parents who died of cancer. We have the ashes of four dogs buried in the front garden. I live in my parent’s house and am haunted by Mom’s reflection in the mirror where I often watched her apply red lipstick. I remember the dogs waiting at the door, sleeping next to the bed.

Loss is inevitable. I am thankful for poets who put life’s grief into words.

Phillips writes about marriage and the momentary pleasures of life, the joy of pizza, and the man on the train who warns “y’all don’t understand yet,/ but you will.”

I understand. Doors are closing, time is short.

May the Living

who read this
still speak of the dead
with wild imprecision:

sins all forgotten,
rage overwritten,
as even our bitterest

enemies shed
great crocodile tears
and pretend.

I hereby forgive
all the bullshit
that follows a death.

If you’re reading this,
we were once friends.:

May the Living from Son of the Closing Doors by Patrick Phillips

Thanks to A. A. Knopf for a free book. ( )