About the Dead: Volume 15

By Travis Mossotti

Book Overview

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."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0874218276
• ISBN13: 9780874218275
• Release Date: September 2011
• Publisher: Utah State University Press
• Length: 88 Pages
• Weight: 0.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.4" x 8.3"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher