Gargoyle Vigilbeautifully elegizes a father while also acknowledging the pain and complicated realities behind such a loss. These honest, unflinching poems track the communally shared experience of dying, from navigating hospice care to recalling one’s memories of thelost, reminding us of the many ways we lose our loved ones before their bodies give out, even as our dreams—and poems—keep some part of them alive. -Paisley Rekdal, author ofWest: A TranslationJamie L. Smith’sGargoyle Vigilis a portrayal of a speaker contending with the loss of a father. What is remarkable about these poems is that they are not static portrayals but grief portals, moving through time and perspective. Like all the best poems that harness lyric time, we jump from each realized snapshot—moonrise in the father’s garden filled with “night lilies” and “tigers, too, / that grew”, to catching beetles in a jar, to the adult speaker in a parking lot clasping her father’s talisman, and back to Venus in the garden, viewed through a telescope—to land in the question, “What wouldn’t I give / to close that distance now?” These are dexterous poems, tender and precise.-Ellen Kombiyil, author of The American Journal of Insanity's Diagnostic on the Plumbing & Wiring of Fema