William Jolliff's At Rest in My Father's House is a sweeping and stunning survey of grief, not only for loved ones or members of his Ohio farm community, but their way of life as well. My favorite poems include: "The Way My Father Farmed", "In Praise of Cowards", and "The Blue Plate." "The Blue Plate" comes at the exact middle of this work, and was a thesis for this work during my reading, an intimate look at an aging woman whose physical ailments symbolize a physical death as well as the death of the way of life, "Her hopes of growing old and dying at home flee with the evenings. She'll soon be a number to check on some nurse's chart, a body to be lifted and fed." Jolliff accomplishes a remarkable feat with this work, vividly reconstructing a bygone worldview with each poem, with tension bubbling underneath each line. By the end, I felt I had read through the transcript of a eulogy, that I loved and lost and most importantly bore witness to a way of life that is rarely discussed in the mainstream. My only critique of this work was some of the mentions to the Vietnam war felt forced. The most successful poem mentioning post-war trauma, for me, was "The Man Who Shoots Stop Signs." There were also various mentions to farm-hands in a few of the poems, and I think this work would have benefitted from a few more poems from the perspective of the farm hands, though the conjured anonymity establishes a clear view of the still present social hierarchy, even within impoverished agricultural communities. All in all, a great read and a beautiful tribute and historical examination of a forgotten way of life.