| Foreword | xi |
| Preface | xiii |
| Part I | Commentary: Who Will Comfort You? | |
| 1 | Poetry of Loss: A Defense | 3 |
| A Book of Comfort | 3 |
| A Work of Art | 4 |
| Occupation and Exile | 6 |
| Narrative Wreckage | 7 |
| The Marriage of Form and Content | 8 |
| Mixture of Literary Genres | 9 |
| Acrostic and Alphabetic Puzzles | 11 |
| Pain and Loss in Alphabetic Order | 12 |
| Relationships among Chapters | 13 |
| Multiple Testimonies | 14 |
| The City as Woman | 14 |
| The Missing Voice | 15 |
| Authorship | 15 |
| Places in the Canon and Titles | 15 |
| Musical Appropriations | 16 |
| 2 | There Is No One to Comfort You: Lamentations 1 | 17 |
| The Narrator's View of Zion's Fall | 18 |
| Daughter Zion Pleads for God to See | 23 |
| A Topography of Pain | 28 |
| 3 | Your Suffering Is Vast as the Sea: Lamentations 2 | 30 |
| Structure of the Poem | 31 |
| The Narrator as Participant in Zion's Reality | 31 |
| The Narrator's Conversion | 35 |
| The Narrator Pleads for Action | 41 |
| 4 | Mercies New Every Day: Lamentations 3 | 44 |
| Changes in Poetic Structures | 45 |
| The First Complaint | 46 |
| Divine Mercies | 49 |
| The Strongman's Second Complaint | 53 |
| Inexplicable Hope | 57 |
| 5 | Beaten Down: Lamentations 4 | 58 |
| Shrinking | 58 |
| Mercy Destroyed | 62 |
| The Community Remembers | 66 |
| 6 | Plea from an Occupied Land: Lamentations 5 | 70 |
| A Shorter, Less Structured Poem | 70 |
| Pain without Compromise | 71 |
| Peril All Around | 75 |
| Unsettled Longing | 79 |
| Part II | Reflections: A Theology of Witness | |
| 7 | The Power of the Missing Voice | 83 |
| Many Views of Tragedy | 83 |
| Inspired Restraint | 85 |
| Denying Pain | 86 |
| The Family as School of Denial | 89 |
| Global Society and Hopelessness | 90 |
| Social Mechanisms of Denial | 91 |
| Denying Pain | 92 |
| Lamentations Denies Denial | 94 |
| 8 | Who Will Comfort You? A Theology of Witness | 96 |
| She Has No One to Comfort Her | 97 |
| The Narrator Sees | 99 |
| You Have to Come Close | 101 |
| Mirroring Pain | 102 |
| Poetry as Salvation | 103 |
| A Theology of Witness | 104 |
| Despair Work | 108 |
| 9 | The Abusing God | 110 |
| God's Character | 111 |
| The Dilemma | 113 |
| Lamentations' Portrait of God | 115 |
| Toward Another View | 119 |
| Enter the Conversation | 121 |
| Stammering toward the Unsayable | 123 |
| 10 | Prayer for the Wounded World | 124 |
| The Lament Form | 124 |
| Prayer as Truthfulness | 125 |
| Lamentations as Impassioned Hope | 127 |
| Lamentations as a Work of Justice | 128 |
| Prayers for the World | 132 |
| Lamentations and Liturgical Prayer | 133 |
| Daring Prayer | 135 |
| Epilogue: The Comforting God | 137 |
| A Spirituality of Wholeness | 137 |
| A Summons to Companionship | 138 |
| Theological Betweenness | 139 |
| A Biblical Response | 139 |
| Zion's Long Struggle | 141 |
| God Is Her Witness | 145 |
| Zion and the Suffering Servant | 147 |
| Bibliography | 149 |
