Abbie Kiefer Had to Figure out Why Television Was Important to a Book About Grief and Hope

At the center of this book are my mom’s illness and death—a process of loss that made me easily distracted. I couldn’t write or read, so I stuck to what I thought of as easy television—cooking shows, predictable dramas. But even those became lenses for my grief, so when I started writing again, an ekphrastic TV poem found its way into what I was doing. And then I wrote a second one.