How to Make Pancakes for a Dead Boy

“bow your head/in prayer to a new Holy Trinity:/Father, Gun, Holy Ghost/place your ear to the floor,/listen for whatever echo/death leaves behind.” In her exquisite chapbook, How to Make Pancakes for a Dead Boy, Joan Kwon Glass becomes an alchemist, transforming unfathomable tragedy into a narrative of mourning, teaching us in the process that there are endless layers to discover even in the heartbreak of a life cut short. Wild with stunned grief, Kwon Glass weaves this tender narrative of bewildering loss with treasures, like the ones her children uncover in the backyard of her centuries-old New England house, “animal bones, smoking pipe, porcelain china, some pieces etched with the surprised or broken faces of Chinese women, their robes adorned with blue and white flowers.” Like the ancient earth around her home, like the tragedy of her nephew’s suicide at age 11, there are secrets and sorrows beneath every surface, dangers lurking behind every door. Aching with desperate regret, Kwon Glass’s wishes to go back in time to keep watch over her nephew so that, “eventually, I would see what needs to be fixed.” These poems deserve our time and care, to read again and again, to uncover their secrets and treasures, to protect ourselves from complacency, to come awake with gratitude for all we still have.

—Meghan Sterling, author of These Few Seeds