“Our Side” was published in the collection Sparrow, which was a National Book Award finalist in 2003. In his review of the book in Publishers Weekly, Michael Scharf describes the collection as follows: “Longing and grief produce concentrated moments of terse, wry observations on grief.” Scharf points out that “the best poems [in this collection] capture the darkly ambiguous ruminations of a partner left behind.”

Most of the poems in Sparrow are about or are addressed to Muske-Dukes's late husband. Ken Tucker, in the New York Times Book Review, describes the collection as follows:

These poems, most of them forthrightly about the death of the author's husband . . . are at once extravagantly emotional in content and tightly controlled as verse, two qualities that echo the extremes of the committed romance described throughout Sparrow.

Kevin Craft, in Seattle's weekly publication The Stranger, says that he has been a fan...