What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature that explores experiences and ideas that spark the writing of new poems. In the newest series, Life in Public, we ask our editors to examine how poetry speaks to different aspects of public experience. Each Monday's delivery brings you the poem and an excerpt from the essay.  
This is the line of outcome.

Gravity of a vein’s collapse
or a heart giving way
paper thin, already
made of ash.

Afterwards we gathered you
into pails or buckets,
into plastic bags tied shut
with string.

Skyward and across
the Atlantic.

I went to a place without trees,
to sever your mind from mine.

You were always so hungry,
or cold. Nearly a ghost.

Still, everyone will say
what was it like to lose a sister.

What was it like to see her body
embalmed within church walls
in your hometown.
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Cover of Andrea Rexilius' book, Sister Urn

"'Gravity' from Sister Urn addresses how Rexilius navigated the knowledge of her sister’s passing on social media, the kinds of questions received there. In conversation, Rexilius has told me 'Gravity' was the first poem she wrote after her sister’s passing. She writes, 'This is the line of outcome.' Cause and effect, the consequence of action, the poem announces that it will attempt narrative in order to account for the unaccountable."
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Photograph of MacArthur grant winner, Emily Wilson, with her translation of Homer's Odyssey

"Emily Wilson’s translation of Homer’s Odyssey, widely praised when it was published in the autumn of 2017, knocked Richmond Lattimore’s Odyssey translation right off the reading list for Columbia College’s famed core curriculum in less than a year." 

via THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER
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