“A reliquary is a receptacle for a holy person’s belongings—such as a scrap of clothing or a tooth. In her marvelous collection, Abigail Wender breaks open the meaning to explore varying contexts for the sacred. She finds the quotidian Timex or pfennig, the ritual stone lion in a cemetery, and the abstract in something like S. In these poems, the reader will find a keenly-felt personal landscape and, along the way, the loss of a brother as he alternately runs away, returns, and fails to stay away from death. With sadness and fury, the poet moves outward, ‘like those who hold oil lamps to light the road.’ Reliquary is a cause for celebration.”
—Kimiko Hahn
“‘This is a reliquary // to hold my brother’s gifts— / his sad kindness,’ says Abigail Wender in her moving, meditative debut, a book of poems whose economy and precision of thought arise and speak to us from within the particular silence of ‘two minds not making amends,’ as Wender negotiates the estrangement between herself and a brother lost to addiction, imprisonment, and their eventual, fatal effects. How to make amends with the dead? How do we extend to the dead—or indeed, receive from them—the ‘breath of forgiveness?’ The taut poems of Reliquary enact the open-endedness of these questions, refuse the falseness of absolute answers, and invite us to accept the fact of death while insisting that there’s still time—which is to say, they remind us, should we tip toward despair, to keep a space for hope.”
—Carl Phillips