Short-listed for the 2017 National Book Award for PoetryThe poems in The Book of Endings try to make sense of, or at least come to some kind of reckoning with absence - the death of the author's mother, the absence of the beloved, the absence of an accountable god, cicadas, the dead stars arriving, the dead moon aglow in the night sky.

Leslie Harrison holds graduate degrees from the Johns Hopkins University and the University of California, Irvine. Her first book, Displacement, won the Bakeless Prize and was published by Mariner Books. She lives and teaches in Baltimore.