The Depositions
Published:
W. W. Norton & Company; 1 edition (November 26, 2019)
Purchase:
Preorder Amazon.com and Indiebound and Powells and Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com and Apple Books
Released on November 26, 2019
New and selected essays on being and ceasing to be.
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.
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.