Plucking the Stinger, the debut poetry collection from Stephanie Rogers, is brutal, unflinching, and beautiful on the line level as well as holistically. Rogers is deft at circling a central, concrete artifact in these poems and using that artifact to carry the poem over the top by the end, requiring the reader to linger for a moment in grief or love or empathy or hope.

For instance, in “On the Death of My Sister's Husband” Rogers works with a set of apartment keys to guide us through the death of the speaker's brother-in-law. More than that, the poem partly functions a rumination on grief. Line by line, the speaker juggles keys, a phone call, and a bag of groceries while trying to make it into the apartment as the weight of the night presses down and engulfs, surrounds: “The keys glint like starlight on the ground, / the porch light winking back, the dark / gone dizzy, while the moon / continues fattening.”

When the speaker knocks over the bag of groceries while unlocking the apartment door, the heaviness of grief is complicated further, yet portrayed with a sense of strangeness that rings true: “What waits there / but silence and the memory of a nightmare / just like this, where my sister made / a phone call, and I answered. I stand up / and place my key in the lock. Moths / keep breaking like my heart against the light.”

Rogers' collection has a fresh, haunting perspective that, by the end, leaves us wondering about the ways we might process trauma to better understand our tiny, violently alive place on the timeline.