RaveFull StopFocal Point...is thus an inner odyssey through illness and loss that imparts the difficult lesson that to live is to grieve ... Qi sets herself a task that will take the length of the book to fulfill: to bring order to the disorderly experience of losing her mother, to bring \'all this erratically focused empathy\' toward a focal point of meaning ... Grief’s directedness toward beauty is crucial here, as is the idea that beauty does not assuage grief so much as focus it ... Qi’s formidable first collection does not leave us with any of the usual pat answers on which our loss-averse culture has grown so dependent. Instead, as California burns and thousands fall ill and die from a resurgent pandemic, her poems inspire us to look up at the sky and, perhaps for the first time, to focus on the questions themselves.