“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.
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