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New and Selected Essays on Being and Ceasing to Be
by Thomas Lynch
A wry and compassionate selection of essays reflecting on mortals and mortality, from the acclaimed author of The Undertaking.
For nearly four decades, poet, essayist, and small-town funeral director Thomas Lynch has probed relations between the literary and mortuary arts. His life's work with the dead and the bereaved has informed four previous collections of nonfiction, each exploring identity and humanity with Lynch's signature blend of memoir, meditation, gallows humor, and poetic precision.
The Depositions provides an essential selection from these masterful collections―essays on fatherhood, Irish heritage, funeral rites, and the perils of bodiless obsequies―as well as new essays in which the space between Lynch's hyphenated identities―as an Irish American, undertaker-poet―is narrowed by the deaths of poets, the funerals of friends, the loss of neighbors, intimate estrangements, and the slow demise of a beloved dog. In "Gladstone," from The Undertaking, Lynch reflects on his then twenty-five years as an undertaker at the Midwinter Conference for Michigan funeral directors, which incongruously takes place on an island in the Caribbean. With brutal, generous honesty, "The Way We Are," from Bodies in Motion and at Rest, grapples with Lynch's time as a single parent coming to terms with generations of his family inheritance of alcoholism and recovery. The press of the author's own mortality animates the new essays, sharpening a curiosity about where we come from, where we go, and what it means.
As Alan Ball writes in a penetrating foreword, Lynch's work allows us "to see both the absurdity and the beauty of death, sometimes simultaneously." With this landmark collection, he continues to illuminate not only how we die, but also how we live.
"Providing an excellent entry point for newcomers to Lynch's work, this assemblage is an erudite but unpretentious discussion of life and mortality by a master craftsman of language." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Thoughtfully crafted musings about life and death." - Kirkus Reviews
"Thomas Lynch is one of my favorite living essayists. His mordant humor and openness to grace and mystery are a tonic. I can think of nothing better than to have in one book this collection of his dazzling former essays, plus the dynamite new ones." - Phillip Lopate
"When asked if writing about the dead affected her view of life, an obituary writer said 'Yes, I divide everyone into two groups: the dead and the pre-dead.' We of the latter group should be grateful to Thomas Lynch for writing about both with equal facility. His essays gathered here offer the pleasure of observing his curious mind dancing to the tune of his lively prose." - Billy Collins
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Photo: Alan Betson
Thomas Lynch is the author of five collections of poems and four books of essays. A book of stories, Apparition & Late Fictions, published in 2010 to critical acclaim, is now available in paperback and can be purchased in bookstores and online.
A "Classic Contemporary" edition of Skating with Heather Grace, his first book of poems, has just be reissued by Carnegie-Mellon University Press. In 2011, Paraclete Press published The Sin Eater: A Breviary -- a collection of his sin-eater poems accompanied by black and white photographs by Michael Lynch and cover art by Sean Lynch. Salmon Press, The Cliffs of Moher, Co. Clare, Ireland published an Irish edition in 2012. The Good Funeral - Death, Grief & The Community of Care, co-authored with theologian, Dr. Thomas G. Long, was published in ...
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