To the badlands and back: a researcher-poet's journey through loss and grief

Qualitative researchers employ poetry to construct meaning out of painful life circumstances, including the grieving process surrounding death. A motive for utilizing poetic inquiry, i.e. the use of poetry in research, is its ability to express emotion and convey complexity. As grieving is a decidedly emotional and complex experience, poetry seems well-suited to represent data in this situation. In this article, I deliberate on grieving, including the identity shifts and struggle for meaning that can occur, and on how it can interact with writing poetry and the research process. Further, I describe my own grieving surrounding the death of my mother and how this process interacted with my ability to write poetry and my identity as a researcher-poet. I explore my search for meaning that led to recontextualizing my grief poetry into a research framework. This article features excerpts of autoethnographic poems and offers further deliberations on poetry and grief.