Family instructions upon release / Elizabeth Kirkby-McLeod.

Poems.

Act 1: Examining the crime scene: Exhibit A -- Two tickets to Twelve Angry Men -- The drama begins -- Act 1 -- Act 1 for Daughter -- Between Acts, where belief comes from -- Between Acts, an explanation -- Act 2 -- Act 2 for Father -- After -- Into the woods they go -- Into the woods is life -- Into the woods is Death -- A planning poem -- Her warning signs -- Why? -- Act 2: Observing the deliberations: Daughter goes to hospital by car -- Father goes to hospital by ambulance -- Waiting room game 1 -- Waiting room game 2 -- A hospital stay -- Family therapy: a sonnet -- Wellness -- Family instructions upon release -- His little apologies -- Normal time -- Locked out in August: Osage County -- Miscarriage -- Daughter goes to hospital another time -- Ways his mind might not be like your mind -- The effect of his absence -- Why he can't sleep again -- A matter of timing -- Preventable -- An action song in place of an action plan -- Effort -- Off script -- Revisiting Twelve Angry Men -- Miscarriage number 2 -- Map of effort-hospital coordinates R8:38 -- Waiting room game 3 -- The brain -- Act 3: Handing out the sentence: Placing blame -- Funeral storytelling -- After burial: grief -- Maybe -- Pictures -- Leaving -- Antenatal class -- Returning -- Birth -- Rebirth -- Ducking out -- Evening lullaby -- Daughter's son gets a casting call -- Daughter gets a casting call -- Critics review: To my father.

'I have no words.' This is so often our response to grief and loss, when dealing with it ourselves or consoling others. Elizabeth's father took his own life in 2012. Unable to find words of her own to write about what had happened, Elizabeth took them instead from the 2006 Penguin Classics edition of 'Twelve Angry Men', a play she and her father attended together when Elizabeth was a teenager, and combined these with the New Zealand Government's `Fact Sheet 4 - Suicide and Self-Harm'. Armed with this limited dictionary, she was able to write poems that are by turns mournful, angry and searching. The cumulative effect is surprising in its narrative drive and cathartic power.