The Mourner's Book of Albums

Using an unconventional blend of traditional and avant-garde forms, this collection of poetry explores both the elegiac tradition and the 21st century attitude of remembrance and grief. Encountering a wide range of arresting events--from a best friend's suicide to the war in Afghanistan and improvised memorials to the plastinate corpses of Body Worlds--these innovative poems survey the forces and forms that shape what and how people mourn. The lively lines, vivid images, and richly-textured voices of the collection are composed in various forms--the lyric, the ballad, the graphic poem, and the fabricated document, among others--as a means of grappling with the many acts and practices that link the living and the dead.