Born Among Mirrors: Poems

A stunning new volume from a poet who insists that light and joy can be gathered from grief and trauma.

Reflecting on the near-loss of her husband and the death of her mother and a beloved friend, Rachel Eliza Griffiths calls upon some of her most beloved poets—Federico García Lorca, Henry Dumas, Sylvia Plath, Sonia Sanchez, and others—to guide her through a scarred wilderness in search of wonder, love, and companionship.

In Born Among Mirrors, she gathers a wide range of contemporary and historical artists and themes: some poems employ Coltrane’s four pillars of A Love Supreme and Freytag’s Pyramid dramatic structure; others praise a diasporic village of Black poetry where voices of both the dead and living call and respond or are named for visual effects of formal photography and nod to popular films, such as Wim Wenders’s Perfect Days and Ridley Scott’s iconic Thelma and Louise.

As Griffiths journeys through the complicated dynamics of loss, she befriends grief, accepting the alchemy, transformation, clarity, and risk required to live beyond mere survival.