Grief, Death, the Discarded Object

What does it mean to be in devotion to trash, or to the Walmart aisle? How can grief, humor, and sexuality coexist?

Three Bay Area poets explore the spectrum of life from the banal to the devastating as a means to enter a deeper relationship with experience itself. In Fifty Mothers, Preeti Vangani processes the death of her mother in a series of fiercely loving, grieving, sexual, and always-processing songs. Leigh Lucas uses dark humor in Splashed Things to reveal chaos in the grieving process after her partner's suicide. In Devotional Forensics, Joseph Kidney places trash in conversation with high art and philosophy. Through tracing the messiness of castaway objects and human body and mind, this conversation makes poetry a tool to unleash humor, bring awareness to the brevity of life, and talk about death in ways that unite.

Preeti Vangani is a poet and writer from Bombay based in San Francisco. She is the author of the poetry collections Mother Tongue, Apologize (2019) and Fifty Mothers (River River Books, 2026). Her work has appeared in AGNI, The Georgia Review, Gulf Coast, and Prairie Schooner, among other places. Her debut short story won the 2021 Pen/Dau Emerging Writers Prize. Vangani has been a resident at UCross, Djerassi and Ragdale. She has received artist grants from San Francisco Arts Commission, YBCA, and The Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. She holds an MFA in Writing from University of San Francisco and teaches in the program.

Leigh Lucas is a writer in San Francisco. Her poetry collection Splashed Things (Boa Editions, 2026) was selected by Maya C. Popa for the A. Poulin Jr. Prize. Her chapbook Landsickness (Tupelo Press, 2024) was selected by Chen Chen for the 2023 Sunken Garden Poetry Chapbook Award. Leigh’s writing can be found in Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Adroit, and elsewhere. She holds a BA from Stanford and an MFA from Warren Wilson.

Joseph Kidney is a Canadian poet whose poems have appeared in Best Canadian Poetry and are forthcoming in The Iowa Review. He won a National Magazine Award Gold Medal for Poetry and the Poem of the Year award from Arc Poetry Magazine. His full-length debut, Devotional Forensics, was published with icehouse poetry in 2025. He currently works as a lecturer at Stanford University, where he completed his PhD in Renaissance drama.

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