Widow's Crayon Box

Widow's Crayon Box is a book-length sequence of poems by Molly Peacock about loss and renewal. After her husband died, Peacock found that she was not living the pale, mauve kind of widowhood people expect. She was experiencing her life in every color.

The poems range across joy, fury, grief, bewilderment, desire, devastation and whimsy. They are written in sonnet sequences and in open forms, and the book is arranged in four movements titled After, Before, When and Afterglow. Together they look at the work of caring for a partner and at the sharp, clear emotions that can follow that partner's death.

Peacock faces even the hardest feelings directly, and she brings energy and good humor to her portrait of widowhood in the twenty-first century. One of the poems describes sensing her husband beside her after he died, and over the following months feeling him slip gradually inward until he was no longer next to her but fully a part of her.