Notes from Source: […]I’ve only seen her in small black-and-white photographs in which she seemed frozen and far, far away. Woolf and Carson’s rejection of traditional modes of writing and grieving, their experimentation with elegy and ways of mourning, and their calling upon poem 101 to frame their “grief-work” compel us, paradoxically, to grasp the fact of their brothers’ existence along with their irredeemable absence: one gifted, adored, a Cambridge University graduate; the other troubled, a struggling student, a run-away.6 I began to wonder whether my own deceased sister is the reason I’m drawn to literature elegizing siblings and to exploring the various and saddening ways in which families lose their children, sometimes long before an actual death. If ever I feel inclined to box away pictures of the first Kristin, box away her teddy bear, I reflect on Woolf and Carson interweaving their elegies for their brothers with the materiality of these men’s lives-a postage stamp, a scrap of a letter, faded photographs, and Thoby’s books and drawings, which Woolf kept in her own library for the rest of her life.7 As Jacob S Room concludes, Mrs. Flanders (who grieves for her own brother, Morty, whereabouts unknown, possibly lost at sea) cries out to his friend Bonamy as she wonders what to do with “a pair of Jacob’s old shoes” (187). Kristin Czarnecki Georgetown College 1 This essay is adapted from The First Kristin: The Story of a Naming, forthcoming from Main Street Rag. 2 You can view the 1913 edition from the Loeb Classical Library online at https://www.loebclassics.com/view/catullus-poems/1913/pb_LCL006.173. xml?readMode=recto. 3 Fleming points out that “[w]hile the book can be read similarly to a codex, with the regular folds forming a sense of left- and right-hand pages, the book is actually one continuous page” (65).

Further Notes: Place: New Haven Publisher: Southern Connecticut State University