Words for the Dead

Words for the Dead is a cycle of elegies to those gone too soon. From the poet’s brother and unborn children to the medieval anchoress lost to the plague and the blackbird murdered from the sky, the collection is both timely and timeless as the poet converses with and bears witness to the lives of the dead: urgent, immediate, and spirited. Translating the revenants’ nonverbal language into poetry, Words for the Dead is also an autopsy conducted upon multiples, pulling poems from the abdomens of recent and ancient deaths, including the death of the word. In these ways, the reader is privileged to the last words as the poems ghost between worlds-living and dead-and the joints of time.