Lucinda Williams has always worn her heart on her sleeve, but on West it’s a mourning band. Written after the death of her mother and a painful romantic breakup (is there any other kind?), her meditation on love and loss picks up the broken pieces and turns them into poetry.

“Are You Alright?” the album’s quietly obsessive opener, reaches out to an ex-lover but will resonate with any New Orleanian who read or wrote those words repeatedly in the subject lines of emails. In “Mama You Sweet,” Williams dives deep into her grief and finds a vivid metaphor for the mechanics of weeping: “Ocean becomes heavy and tries / to push its way out / through these ancient eyes.” And no one ever begged for redemptive love with more visceral urgency than Williams does in “Unsuffer Me.” That plea is seared by the strings of violininst Jenny Scheinman, one of several guest artists brought in by producer Hal Willner, whose work on Marianne Faithful’s Strange Weather echoes in the atmospheric West.

Willner did not produce Faithful’s scurrilous “Why’d You Do,” but Williams’ spitting-word rant, “Wrap My Head Around That,” is in the same deliciously vengeful vain. “Come On,” with its double entendre kiss-off, is even funnier. It’s also the closest West gets to rocking out, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Willner creates a cohesive ambience with avant jazzbos like Bill Frisell that meshes well with Williams’ sensual, laconic drawl. But the album does settle into a mid-tempo groove and bogs down with a couple fillers. “Where Is My Love?” name-checks cities like she did when she went looking for “Joy,” but lacks the earlier song’s musical and lyrical grit. And Joan Osborne asked “What if God were one of us?” years ago to far greater effect than Williams does on “What If,” a series of goofy topsy-turvy questions that could (maybe) make a good kids’ song if Imagination Movers sped it up to double time.

But hey, Lucinda Williams released three perfect albums in a row, beginning with her 1998 breakthrough, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road. If she drops the ball a couple times on West, it hardly matters in the iPod age. The vast majority of these songs aren’t just keepers but Williams’ classics, including the title track. The future opens up like a vast horizon on “West,” where she’s ready to “close my eyes and let my imagination run.” Can’t wait to see where it leads her next.

Lucinda Williams plays Jazz Fest Friday, April 27 at 5:35 p.m. on the Gentilly Stage