“Windower is an essential addition to the grief canon. At once the memoir of an agonized man reeling from his wife’s suicide and of a man falling in love again; of the guilt and self-abasement a survivor accepts as penance for ordinary sins, and the thousand daily incursions of beauty which preempt his total self-destruction. In refusing to so much as name these expertly observed experiences ‘contradictions,’ Michael Loughran has given us something unique and humane. In spite of its gravity, my predominant feeling reading this book was relief, relief that someone got it right, told the truth.” —Lisa Wells

“Windower is an impressively understated yet harrowing demonstration of the truth of Nicholson Baker’s definition of poetry as ‘a controlled refinement of sobbing.’” —David Shields

“With unflinching honesty, Michael Loughran reckons with his wife’s suicide and the unexpected reality of falling in love again just six months later. Windower is a raw, poetic, and deeply intimate exploration of the space where love and loss blur, each threatening to become the other. Through mythologies, daydreams, confessions, and ghosts, Loughran doesn’t just document grief—he inhabits it. The result is a spare yet powerful meditation on what it means to be fully alive.” —Juliet Patterson

“‘Anything true is good to say,’ Michael Loughran writes early on in Windower. The Furies, hostile monks, grief, love, and shame in all their unlikely plumage: Loughran has the words for it, and he also has the words for what he doesn’t have the words for. By the end of this devastating book, I couldn’t help but feel really, really good. Windower has the remarkable ability to imagine as literal what we so often fear to be inexpressible. The result is a book full of startling image, an intricately plotted mechanism that builds until the last page.” —Thomas Mira y Lopez