A Woman Dressing To Leave re-chronicles biracial identity, parental illness and memory loss, inheritance, grief, migration, and how familial pasts and trauma can color the search for romantic connection. Forms of making are a significant through-line: the mother’s floral art and garden, the grandfather’s woodwork, the fables/myths, the father’s labor and books, the daughter’s writing and curation of familial memories, the lover’s mathematical proofs. What is the specific pain of coming into your own as a writer, building worlds and gaining language, while your father loses language and access to the world? Can we use language to express grief as a continuous act or activity, rather than creating a stagnant memorial? How can poetry combat the neutrality inherent within the language of medicine and diagnosis? A Woman Dressing To Leave aims to disrupt traditional illness narratives and linear understandings of decline and progress. The manuscript is structured with no one instant of illness discovery or one specific moment of change, and the poems do not work in the logic of a before/after. The poems complicate the temporality of death by exploring it as a series of recurring, reverberating events, not just a singular event of bodily death. For this speaker, imbued with the voice of restraint in the face of chaos, every moment is a possibility of conversing with her father and of memorializing for her future self, an endless labor. A Woman Dressing To Leave oscillates between shorter bursts of poems that act as reprieve and long poetry sequences which put into practice this temporality of continuous, activating events in a scale that moves between the familial, the romantic, and the exterior events of the natural world.