About the Dead - Volume 15

Travis Mossotti writes with humor, gravity, and humility about subjects grounded in a world of grit, where the quiet mortality of working folk is weighed. To Mossotti, the love of a bricklayer for his wife is as complex and simple as life itself: "ask him to put into words what that sinking is, / that shudder in his chest, as he notices / the wrinkles gathering at the corners of her mouth." But not a whiff of sentiment enters these poems, for Mossotti has little patience for ideas of the noble or for sympathetic portraits of hard-used saints. His vision is clear, as clear as the memory of how scarecrows in the rearview, "each of them, stuffed / into a body they didn't choose, resembled / your own plight." His poetry embraces unsanctimonious life with all its wonder, its levity, and clumsiness. About the Dead is an accomplished collection by a writer in control of a wide range of experience, and it speaks to the heart of any reader willing to catch his "drift, and ride it like the billowed / end of some cockamamie parachute all the way / back to the soft, dysfunctional, waiting earth."

Product details

• Authors: Travis Mossotti
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Behalf of Up Colorado
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 20.10.2011
• EAN: 9780874218275
• ISBN: 978-0-87421-827-5
• No. of pages: 88
• Dimensions: 135 mm x 213 mm x 7 mm
• Weight: 126 g
• Series: May Swenson Poetry Awards; May Swenson Poetry Awards; Swenson Poetry Award
• Subjects: Fiction > Poetry, drama; Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies