Poet Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno dealt with a mother's worst nightmare when her daughter was murdered. After Rachel Mennies finished reading Bonanno's poems, she felt compelled to pick up the phone.

"All I could think was, 'I need to call my mom,' " Mennies (graduate-English) said.

Bonanno will read tonight from that same book, "Slamming Open the Door," at the Palmer Museum of Art as part of the Department of English's Mary E. Rolling Reading Series.

Mennies, who will introduce Bonanno at the event, said some of her peers couldn't finish the book because of its visceral subject matter. She said Bonanno is unsparing in her work, giving excerpts from news articles detailing how her daughter, Leidy Bonanno, was strangled by her ex-boyfriend in 2003.

She said the death of Bonanno's daughter, who was 21 and had recently graduated from nursing school, is particularly relevant to college students because of the girl's age and the proximity of the event -- she was murdered in West Reading, Pa.

"[Bonanno's] poetry is written to be in communication with young people," she said.

Geffrey Davis said he also called his mother after reading the book. A part of the book that affected him was a poem in which Bonanno calls her daughter and never gets an answer back, he said.

"My mom had called me and I hadn't called her back yet," Davis (graduate-English) said. "It got me reconsidering what I took to be my mom's over-worrying."

The poems explore several emotions, including rage, sadness and fondness for the memories she spent with her daughter. The book isn't about the tragedy itself, but how people deal with death afterward, he said.

"I think it's more than 'call your mom,' although I think that was the right thing to do," Davis said.

Robin Becker, a professor of English and women's studies, said Bonanno's work is a book-length elegy that breaks poetic tradition in how it approaches her daughter's death.

"One of the definitions of poetry is emotion recollected in tranquility," Becker said. "Here, there is very little distance between the narrator and her subject."