Ashes by Rodger LeGrand
Finishing Line Press, softcover, $17.99 (Release date: November 13, 2026) (Pre-order now for $15.99)
It’s clear Rodger LeGrand is in the correct profession as a humanitarian education and crisis response advocate. His latest chapbook, Ashes, is brimming with compassion, and it voices our shared relationship with loss. He speaks to our current era, and his poetic voice gains power with every new collection.
LeGrand voices what others perhaps prefer to shy away from—the heartbreak of loss and how it is increasing with a collective uptick in our “declining values,” which he spells out in his poem “Decline.” He traces the decline of our naivety about invincibility, and the decline of our innocence as we realize we can’t emotionally save each other. This is a solo process. We become aware of what these discomforts bring when he acknowledges them on the page. It’s the wisdom of truth-telling, as he does here with these lines: “I never had enough optimism / to distill the brevity of my existence / to anything more pure / than a sigh.” Grief and despair strip optimism the way trying to breathe with an elephant on your chest does, to steal Tamara Ellis Smith’s metaphor.
Like grief, this chapbook isn’t linear; it cycles through denial, disbelief, triggered memories, and numbness. In Ashes, we see how grief knocks us off our feet, temporarily kidnapped, hijacked, and unable to reach anyone or anything that once mattered. LeGrand captures the disorientation of loss with short lines that mirror the fragmented, jumping expressions of sorrow. A blip, a pause, can cause a stir, and then, bam, grief pounces and memories surge, and LeGrand’s imagery leaps off the page to show us this. Time is also hijacked, as we see in his poem “Plankton,” where LeGrand writes, “But too much time has passed / for anything approximating / a new beginning to matter.”
This unnervingly honest private, now public, narrative is both direct and indirect about what or who was lost, but like loss itself, these poems skillfully show just how disorienting it is. We see that in his poem, “Drowned.” “I can’t tell any longer / where the inside of me is / or the outside of me starts / or how these two ends of nothing / connect to chalkline my existence. / It’s raining straight through me, / through my body, lungs, rivulets / over bone, forming lakes between / joints, and deeper, into / the parts of me hollowed out / where a soul should be wedged in. / Every part of me wants not to be me.”
Grief isn’t something you get over; it’s incorporated, and LeGrand masterfully weaves it into a potent emotional force through his sensory descriptions, which make the metaphorical grieving process far more visceral. LeGrand’s lines hold secrets about how the poems come together, how language helps us process loss, and how laying it down on the page makes something shift. Better out than in. Better for his readers to have something to hold on to as they reach out during their own dark nights.
