Paperback, 86 pages

From Catullus to Carson, poets have grappled with how to properly address the dead, seeking a vocabulary that can perform the burial ritual, communicate sorrow, can celebrate and perhaps even immortalize. Are words ever enough, lofted as they are into a casket? While Amy Lawless’s My Dead is not “just” elegy—in turns it is a tragicomic celebration of life, of sex, of the ridiculousness of a humanity that can be simultaneously affected and unaffected—it is the certainty of death, that longing to speak to the dead and the impossibility of the words to convey or carry our messages, that underpins this startling, devastating collection.