Traci Brimhall

THE GRIEF ARTIST

For fans of Six Feet Under and Caitlin Doughty’s From Here to Eternity comes a meditation on grief, rituals and art by award-winning author Traci Brimhall

The Grief Artist is a collection of essays that reflects on death rituals and the absence thereof in contemporary American culture. Brimhall examines the wreaths and tableaux of Victorian mourners, death photography and mourning fashions. She rents a haunted house to try and talk to the dead and a museum of haunted objects in the effort to experience something spiritual and uncanny, made blankets for hospice patients, visited ghost towns and interviewed believers of the paranormal all while trying to understand her own grief. During her travels and investigations she came to understand how deeply individualized mourning and grief was to people across the United States. But through lyrical and thoughtful observations also asks the question how do we grieve communally? Can we? Is it possible to build a more accessible set of cultural death rituals? Through cultural analysis and observation, historical research and personal story, Brimhall contemplates how we grieve and endure.

“What happens when one of our nations’ best poets turns her weird on wonderful gaze on death and darkness? In this vibrant and highly entertaining collection, we follow the author through romps with haunted dolls and houses, books bound in human skill, elephant mourning rituals, death dinners, solar eclipses, and dying people’s last words. Enriched with research, studded with arcane facts that prove startlingly relevant, Traci Brimhall’s The Grief Artist is a reflective, wise, and thoroughly original book.” ––Beth Ann Fennelly, author or The Irish Goodbye: Micro-Memoirs

“While these essays are indeed memento mori –death awareness – they are also memento vivere – life awareness. As a poet herself,Brimhall knows how to embody Wallace Stevens’ assertion in “Sunday Morning” that “Death is the mother of beauty.” In the process, she celebrates and elevates our mortality in ways only an original and committed artist can.” ––Sue William Silverman, author of Selected Misdemeanors: Essays at the Mercy of the Reader

“Where in human life do our visceral and spiritual realms intersect more than in moments of grief? In this fascinating collection, Traci Brimhall conducts gorgeous autopsies on sorrow and loss. She dissects physical objects, body parts, haunted places, violences, and memories. Such work makes Brimhall’s essays common spaces for acts of mourning and moribund curiosity, for meditations on pain as well as complicated pleasure. And thanks to her artful approach to the essay form, these foundational emotions become alchemical powers.” ––Elena Passarello, author of Animals Strike Curious Poses

“In Traci Brimhall’s luminous and ranging collection, fascination is less an antidote to the “losses we carry like lead belts across our hips” than a grounding wire running underneath the wide geography of grief. These pages are dense with the revelatory and  imperfect solace of what we can know: from the intertwining  of blood flukes, the myriad textures of darkness, and the long history of hauntings, to the scalloped anatomy of the heart  and the precise choreography of an eclipse’s arrival, all of it a record of our  inevitable interdependence, beautiful and terrible.  This is a mother’s book, a daughter’s, a friend’s, one that affirms, over and over again, a precise and wild catalog of “reasons for living” even as it knows that to live is  to wound and be wounded, to lose. In these essays, the world is both hard and deeply beloved, both things bound together. I needed this book; you do too.”  ––Molly McCully Brown, author of Places I Have Taken My Body

LOVE PRODIGAL

“Brimhall follows up Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod with a deep plunge into the pain of love lost through divorce and the slow scramble to recovery…Refreshingly Brimhall doesn’t fall to rage or ranting but uses the occasion to examine how she’s lived…[S]he celebrates her son, seeks new love, and ruefully acknowledges the limits of a body growing older even as she copes with her mother’s death. What results is an intense flow of loose-limbed, vividly imagined, and deeply felt poems. VERDICT: Brimhall addresses life’s everyday suffering in astonishing language that will attract a wide range of readers. Highly recommend.” —Library Journal, starred review

“During an interview for the Miami Book Festival, she called the book ‘an ode to friendship and the people who love me.’ This is a lovely collection to give — and keep.” —Ron Charles, Washington Post

“Love, divorce, illness, and grief are at the center of Brimhall’s expansive and moving fifth collection (after Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod). The title poem is among the book’s most evocative, framing love as something that, like the prodigal son, departs, endures hardship, and returns—sometimes changed, sometimes forgiven.”—Publishers Weekly