The Irish Goodbye: Micro-Memoirs

Poet and essayist Fennelly (Heating & Cooling) delivers a modestly profound collection of anecdotes and observations that link together to form a robust self-portrait. At the center of the volume is Fennelly’s grief over her sister, who died of bronchial pneumonia at 39. Fennelly renders the fallout with breathtaking candor (reading a novel featuring a character with her sister’s name “is like reading my life. The main character keeps tripping over the minor character, who exited early”) and bruising humor (“I’m sorry to be stupid in the middle of this memo, but is it really possible I had a child while you were out?”). Elsewhere, Fennelly turns a keen eye toward her home life, discussing the sweet inside jokes and ordinary-but-meaningful domestic rituals that she and her husband share, and directs those same powers of observation toward subjects from yoga to Covid-era isolation. In the process, she transforms the mundane into the metaphysical under the heat of her gaze. With a poet’s knack for concision and a novelist’s deep well of empathy, Fennelly makes everyday moments worthy of close reading. (Feb.)