mourning

Obsessive Tactics in Patty Yumi Cottrell’s Sorry to Disrupt the Peace

Obsessive Tactics in Patty Yumi Cottrell’s Sorry to Disrupt the Peace

BySue Rainsford

In Patty Yumi Cottrell’s novel Sorry to Disrupt the Peace, the narrator Helen Moran investigates her adopted brother’s suicide, an effort complicated by Helen’s own profound alienation. Relentlessly interior, discursive and associative, the novel reads as the direct outcome of Helen’s grief, an inner crisis she attempts to control with obsessive tactics that give the novel its form.

The Veins of the Ocean and the Politics of Grief

The Veins of the Ocean and the Politics of Grief

ByBryan Washington

Despite the foothold grief retains in our lives at large, its portrayals in our art are often one-size-fits-all. It isn’t simply a question of what is appropriate to grieve—the world provides no shortage of reasons for that—but whether on the television, over Facebook, or, most perplexingly, within literary fiction, we put parameters on not only…