Book Synopsis

In The Nautilus, Sonia Greenfield traces the final illness and death of her mother through a series of unsparing poems that move through childhood memory, caregiving, grief, and inheritance. As she sorts through her mother's belongings, the speaker tries to make sense of a life marked by love, addiction, resilience, and loss. Both tender and sharp-eyed, these poems ask what can be salvaged after death and what remains forever unknowable. Like the spiraling chambers of its title, The Nautilus explores memory itself: mysterious and endlessly unfolding.

Advanced Praise for The Nautilus:

In The Nautilus, Sonia Greenfield excavates the past to examine a fraught inheritance: the father she never knew and a mother whose early beauty curdled into illness, addiction, and unanswered questions. Moving fluidly through time and space, memory and imagination, these stunning poems trace the body as both archive and wound — what’s kept, what’s discarded, what festers, and ultimately what’s let go. “Mother,” Greenfield writes,” I’m trying to resist what sours inside me.” Unsparing and lyrically precise, The Nautilus spirals inward toward grief’s center, asking what it means to mourn someone you never fully knew and to inherit her shape anyway.

—Sarah Freligh, author of Sad Math and A Brief Natural History of Women

“I get how hard it is / to let go. I understand how obscene / metaphors can be,” writes Sonia Greenfield in The Nautilus, a magnificent collection of poems which interrogates the visceral realities of cancer and the bruise that grieving a mother can leave on our hearts. Having lost my own mother to cancer in 2016, I felt my experience mirrored and affirmed in poems which not only upend the restrictive cultural etiquette of mourning but re-invents it: Spontaneous weeping in the shower of an AirBnB in Cocoa, a mother’s seafoam sweater which becomes both closet fixture and albatross. In a literary landscape rich with grief narratives, this one held me like the mother I lost and will always love.

—Sara Henning, author of Burn, Terra Incognita,and View From True North

In The Nautilus, Sonia Greenfield gives voice to "the sudden undoing" which is the loss of her mother. These incandescent and honest poems move through many chambers: love, rage, the "weight we take on & what we lose," the mysteries of a life that includes hoarding and physical and substance abuse. And here too Greenfield wrestles with her own mortality and what it means for her relationship with her son. These poems teach us that in order to move through the chambers of grief we must attend to the particulars--Kools, Budweiser, Ziggy Stardust and Linda Ronstadt, an old dachshund, a silver LOVE ring.

—Athena Kildegaard, author of Prairie Midden and Course