"A moving meditation on grief and motherhood by one of Britain's most celebrated poets. Say Something Back will allow readers to see just why Denise Riley has been held in such high regard by her fellow poets for so long. The book reproduces A Part Song, a profoundly moving document of grieving and loss, and one of the most widely admired long poems of recent years. Elsewhere these poems become a space for contemplation of the natural world and of physical law, and for considering what it is to invoke those who are absent. But finally, they extend our sense of what the act of human speech can mean--and especially what is drawn forth from us when we address our dead. Lyric, intimate, acidly witty, unflinchingly brave, Say Something Back--which also includes a powerful new prose meditation about grief and its aftermath, "Time Lived, Without Its Flow"--is a deeply moving book by one of our finest poets, and one destined to introduce Riley's name to a wide new readership"--

Denise Riley's nonfiction includes War in the Nursery: Theories of the Child and Mother (1983); "Am I That Name?" Feminism and the Category of "Women" in History (1988); The Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony (2000); The Force of Language (with Jean-Jacques Lecercle; 2004); and Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect (2005). Her poetry collections include Marxism for Infants (1977), Dry Air (1985), Mop Mop Georgette (1993), and, most recently, Selected Poems 1976-2016 (2019).

Max Porter is the author of the novels Lanny and Grief Is the Thing with Feathers.