Reflections

Reflections earns its Booky on Emotional Resonance because it does something deceptively difficult: it refuses to tidy grief up. Lisa Carnabuci, writing as Soul Searcher, moves through loss without resolution, and that refusal is the book's real argument. The preface alone — "They say that, with time, wounds heal and heartaches will lessen. I say the complete opposite" — signals a writer who isn't performing grief for an audience but excavating it for herself and, crucially, for every reader who has been told to heal on someone else's schedule.

The poems addressed to Tina-Marie carry the collection's emotional weight most reliably. "Cries in the Night" lands its central image — the cardinal as a visitation, a thread of connection — with genuine delicacy. "Our Derby Girl," a poem about visiting the grave on Kentucky Derby Day and putting on a hat in solidarity with a sister who loved the pageantry of it, is the collection's most specific and therefore most universal moment: grief rendered in mint juleps and fishing poles rather than abstraction.

On Theme & Substance, the book sustains a coherent argument about survivorship — that the people left behind carry costs the departed are released from — and revisits it from multiple angles, including the bracingly dark sequence of poems written from the perspective of someone contemplating or completing suicide. That sequence asks uncomfortable questions about culpability and social cruelty that most poetry collections would soften. Here, they are left raw. That rawness is a craft choice, and it works for the reader this book is actually for: anyone who has loved someone they couldn't save, or feared they were becoming someone who couldn't be saved.