Mythical, slippery, shapeshifting: Grief is the Thing With Feathers transforms tragedy into literature

This short book gives voice to a family who have lost their wife and mother, and their sorrows, in an impressive example of how to write about tragedy. Critics have called it, variously, a novel, a verse novel, a prose poem, magical realism, formal experimentation, and a play for voices. Like Porter's later novels, this is a story of people on the margins, people struggling against adversities. He tells those tales in fragments, flickering images, surprising swirls of language and wit.