In Tracy Youngblom’s Boy, the author attempts to delve the depths of convoluted memories to uncover some semblance of healing. Parts 1 through 7 take the reader chronologically through her memories of the death of her younger brother, the grief of a distant father, and the lasting impacts of both on her family life, spirituality, and her own parenting. It is a courageous work, filled with personal expressions of real and very raw emotion that is dealt with through the writing of the poems that constitute the work, but not healed by the expression, rather, shown to be yet unhealed. The reverberations of the tragedies that befell the author’s life have had lasting consequences that have laid bare the hope for healing in the face of such events and given them power both to impact the reader as a cautionary tale and to tell a story of courage, determination, and strength.

As early as the third poem, entitled, simply “iii.” the author shows the beauty of an idyllic birth polluted by the convoluted memory of a wary moon. She writes,

“The moon, that big innocent eye,

was wide open the night

he was born… (9).

This was seemingly a celebrant moon, heralding the arrival of a new and healthy baby boy. But only a few lines later, the moon turns from full and innocent to:

It was a slim dipping moon

that night, a winking moon—

knowing (9).

Here the moon is personified as knowing that it would claim the life of the author’s brother just a few years later and it is cast as something mysterious, powerful, and foreboding. In later poems,  the death of her brother is imagined, and he is given a peaceful end, not gasping, but simply taking in the view of a sunny window and then tumbling off to sleep as if in a pool of water. Cognitively, the author likely knows that the death was nothing like what she describes, but this invented death is part not knowing, and part needing a story to tell to be at peace with it. It is powerful and pitiful: beautiful and heart-breaking.

Boy is a book for anyone who has had to carry on with life after the death of a loved one. That appeal is, unfortunately, universal. The author does the work for her readers of dealing with the grief and shame of such a loss at an early age and expresses it with wonder, beauty, and honesty. I recommend it for those who are in a book club that is centered on recovery. Read it with friends.