A writer wrestles with grief and anger during her mother’s deterioration.

Ashley Warren, a writer who lives in Cambria, has written a book of poems, experimental prose, memories and vignettes about her mother as she succumbed to Parkinson’s disease. The title,Tiny Coffins, is a metaphor.

“It is actually in reference to my mother’s hoarding,” Warren writes by email. “In the book, I refer to all of her boxes of memories as ‘tiny coffins.’ And when I decided to format the book’s pages as vignettes it felt like each page was just that – a tiny coffin of memory and grief.”

After battling the disease for six years, Warren’s mother died unexpectedly on New Year’s Day 2017. Part of the book’s power comes from Warren’s conflicting emotions.

“I would have loved to share my book with her, [but] I was too afraid,” Warren says. “I feared it would hurt her terribly. The way I felt about my mother confused me and still does.”

There is ambivalence on every page.

A million other pills that have the sole strength to tame the tremors and paralysis and anxiety.

Before, all her brain needed was more sun and spinach and laughter.

The pages jump back and forth in time (maybe like the way a person with Parkinson’s thinks), from childhood scenes in Minnesota to the present day in California to dispatches from trips and travels. There is grief, there is also a struggle. Whatever hurts and losses they’ve suffered together, her mom’s recession into dementia leaves Warren alone to face them. The book is about the fragility of memory, it’s a reflection on loss, it’s a eulogy for a mother and daughter.

ASHLEY WARREN reads from Tiny Coffins 7pm Saturday, Nov. 10, at Henry Miller Library, 48603 Highway 1, Big Sur. Free. ashley.warren11@gmail.com, ashleywarrenworks.weebly.com