A girl rides on an outgrown tricycle, biting a necklace of candy hearts. A woman sleeps with a bullet under her tongue. In these vivid and crushing poems, despair has a scent and it’s “half perfume, half something rotten.” Wild with loss and obsession, the poems of “Plucking the Stinger” throb like medication in the throat, a ballet interrupted by a couple breaking up, a false positive test, the terrible death of someone dear. This book is a love letter to grief with no return address.