Grief Is the Thing with Feathers

A man and his two sons are visited by Crow after the death of their mother. Porter writes in fragments — prose poems, monologues, shards of dialogue — and the form is inseparable from the content. Grief does not arrive in complete sentences. This book knows that.

It is very short. It is also one of the most formally inventive things published in Britain in the last decade. The Crow figure draws on Ted Hughes, but Porter makes it entirely his own — feral, funny, and genuinely strange. We sell a lot of copies of this one. People come back for more.