In her first collection of poetry, On Every Stone, Rachel Vigier explores the meaning of disappearance as she reflects on the life and loss of her sister, Micheline, who disappeared October 9, 1988. But the disappearance Vigier describes in this slim volume of poetry is not simply the physical loss of a sister. She also catalogues the many smaller disappearances that she witnessed as her sister struggled against mental illness: “I want to write about my sister and craziness and how a line/can define the point of disappearance.”

The strongest poems in this collection are those that explore the tension between Vigier’s poetic writing and the scraps of writing her sister left behind. As she writes in the opening poem,“Disappeared”: “I know you will search my work – crazy stories – some written backwards,/… I know you will find every word that matters/markers for a grave I never left behind.” Retracing the line her sister took through language into absence, Vigier explores what it means to write loss – her own and her sister’s: “Every time I read her words/I’m thrown back/to what I don’t know,/the mind/loosening itself/in a crevice of thought,/or a faultline/in the syntax of behaviour.”

In these poems, language is both a mode of expression and a mode of connection – or the point of intersection – between the two sisters. So Vigier’s act of remembrance is also an act of reincarnation. She is writing her sister, if only in words, back into her physical world: “packing dreams against hard earth/writing sister on every stone.”

There is, as one might expect given the subject, an unfinished quality to this book. Vigier can write no poem to “close the case” on her sister’s disappearance, or to safeguard her memories of her sister’s life. This sense of incompleteness becomes even more pronounced when Vigier introduces a handful of poems about the events of Sept. 11. There is, simply, much more poetry that could have been written on these subjects, and with such a low page count, this collection certainly has room to accommodate it.