This beautiful collection of poems was both heartbreaking and healing. Van Winckel takes the deaths of various John Does around Spokane, and the brief, clinical descriptions of them given by the medical examiner, and weaves from each one a story which fleshes them out into the people they might have been. These poems feel like a gentle washing of the the bodies, a respectful preparation of those who have passed without such ministrations. Van Winckel's language makes these tragedies into something more than the unremarkable endings they would have been. 
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