In PIANO PIANO, Clarvoe crafts a luminous meditation on time, loss, and the enduring power of art to transform grief into grace. These poems move with the deliberate tempo their title suggests -- piano piano, slowly, gently -- through landscapes both intimate and archaeological, from a father's final breaths to ancient curse tablets unearthed in Turkish soil.

With exquisite attention to craft, Clarvoe weaves together the personal and the timeless: a bee working alongside the poet at her window, fragments of pottery that carry the "added failure" of ancient repairs, and Lumière's first flickering films. Her voice finds profound beauty in broken things -- fibroid infarctions become odes, torn fieldbook pages become elegies.

This collection reveals how memory and art preserve what matters most: the music falling "slantwise / like the gold ray / of the Annunciation" that accompanied a father's final season. PIANO PIANO is a masterwork of formal innovation and emotional precision.