Bess Cooley's Florence is an artful and touching collection of poems with piercing meditations on loss, time, and memory. Cooley's speaker muses about how changes in the body and brain can alter identity, faced with their own body's vulnerabilities and the difficulty of aiding a grandfather through dementia. Intimately linked with the speaker's journey, the poems are a stunning portrayal of the wishes, regrets, and intricacies of a mind's lifetime. The speaker dips in and out of reality, and the reader is welcome to follow. Lines like "I've been writing love poems to my grandfather / who has started to call me the poet, the stranger poet" offer pause and possibility. With an altered mind, reality shifts; but perhaps the erasure of one reality opens room for another. Cooley's poems are the kind you come back to repeatedly to find wisdom, warmth, or remembering. In Florence, the speaker's is an inspiring account of rebuilding after loss, and making sense of what is left.
