Sifting the Ashes

Michael Bailey and Marge Simon, both Bram Stoker Award-winning writers, wrote this poetry collection together. Its more than one hundred poems, some by each author alone and others written jointly, examine how a person keeps going once everything has been abruptly wiped away.

The poems turn over the ruins of a fire, sorting through the ash for whatever can still be salvaged. Along the way they draw on the authors' own experiences of love, loss and personal tragedy, and they reflect on death, cremation and the stages of grief.

The collection is built around one question: what might remain to be found among the remnants once all has been lost?