'The Book of Forgetting' is about the blessed passage of time, when life starts moving again. Once you get past those first raw pages, Book of Hours splinters into other chapters. 'O how I want/to waste my heart/on things that don't/matter much,' Young writes in 'Flag Day,' before wishing to have his father back again, 'here, not silent, only/quiet, as before.' But together, they form a narrative, a memoir of what it's like to come through to the other side. They're almost all composed of very short lines choked with dashes and ampersands, like someone gasping for breath between bone-deep wails. Most of these poems are only a page or two. Every line read is another tiny step further away from heartbreak and toward a more agreeable place. You're down there with him, and he's down there with you, and you're enduring together. Reading Young's poetry doesn't feel like dwelling, like lingering on the hurt the way you keep touching a mysterious bruise on your elbow.

If you've lost a person, you remember those horrible gray days in the beginning of the grief, when the loss has to be remembered again and again, like a fly smashing into a windowpane. Book of Hours opens with an array of poems, in mostly chronological order, documenting Young's life, from the time he first discovers his father's death in a hunting accident to the point when his father's death becomes history to him, a stone sarcophagus in the middle of every room he visits, unchangeable and looming, a part of the scenery. Instead, it's more of a howl, an inside-out yawp from a wounded animal that will stick with you forever. The most accurate way I can describe Book of Hours to you is as a document of grief, but that makes it sound dark, gothy, brooding, something overwrought, and that's not an accurate or fair description.

It's one of those rare reading experiences that I recognized, even as I read it, as a book I was going to buy over and over again, to give as a gift to friends who've had that certain hole cut out of them, the loss that you can recognize from a distance, even in the happiest of times. Just shy of 200 pages, it's long for a book of poetry but too short to be a novel. I've read plenty of books about grief and about coming through grief in my life, but I've never before encountered a book that gets it as right as Kevin Young's Book of Hours (Alfred A. Grief makes you new again, knocks you to your foundations and ensures that you can't ever rebuild in quite the same way. If you've lost someone close to you, you understand this: You couldn't go back in time and explain what the loss feels like to your past self. You can't explain grief to someone who hasn't felt it.

The book of hours kevin young