How We Bury Our Dead, by Jonathan Travelstead
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How We Bury Our Dead, by Jonathan Travelstead
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Jonathan Travelstead's debut collection of poetry, HOW WE BURY OUR DEAD, follows a speaker who is coping with the death of his mother. He places himself in life-threatening and self-alienating situations in an effort to shield himself from grief. This collection takes the reader on Travelstead's journey as a volunteer in the National Guard in Kuwait, as a hitch-hiker in an Alaskan winter, and as a man returning home to confront the pressures of his life as a firefighter and the long-delayed acceptance of losing his mother. ADVANCE PRAISE: "Jonathan Travelstead maps the quest for his elemental "end points and beginnings." Doing so, he spans topography as various as Southern Illinois strip mines, automobile accident scenes, and Iraqi battle zones. What results are narratives that bare-knuckle gut-punch easy redemption. These poems honor the dead and the dying, refusing to avert the eye from certain explosion. It's no wonder the keenest offer "prayers" for hand tools that do something palpably useful, say, prying open the wrecked heart's flaming chariot of half-spoken desires." -Kevin Stein, author of Wrestling Li Po for the Remote "Jonathan Travelstead's fearless poems are about the other in each of us, those sudden illuminations of the self in which we realize we are not alone. The voices of the estranged, the willfully forgotten, and the restless dead inhabit us. In any given moment, a lover's face or gesture reveals a mother we've run toward and away from all our lives. An electrocuted man's last minutes tick away to reveal our need to both connect with and hide from one another, to rely on comforting fictions to soften the truth, to insure that we don't go into that anonymous dark alone. It's a startling, affirming collection that stares down our other selves, compels them to speak." -Scott Blackwood, author of See How Small "In HOW WE BURY OUR DEAD, Travelstead sings out a tortuous and indelicate elegy that singes the most remote edges of loneliness. ...These poems escape and embrace the grief of his mother's death in equal measure." -Travis Mossotti, author of About the Dead and Field Study
How We Bury Our Dead, by Jonathan Travelstead- Amazon Sales Rank: #2599983 in Books
- Published on: 2015-03-10
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.99" h x .24" w x 5.00" l, .26 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 100 pages
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Most helpful customer reviews
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful. An Overall Sensation Of Redemption By Saleh Mohammed Radaideh Beautifully written book. There's a story line to the poetry, attracting me more and more with each page. If there's any poetry book I'd recommend, it would be this one. Each line hits me in a different way, and the articulation of the stanzas is staggering. The combination of words fit together like an artwork, and give an overall sensation of redemption. This is one of those books where I'd have to read more than once to get enough of. A must read for all poetry lovers.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful. Some Sort of a Review By Christopher C. Douglas I am not the right person to review a book of contemporary poetry. I am old on the inside. When I spoke with the poet, I asked him how many sonnets his collection contained. He told me it was less than I might hope for. This was true. I study 18th-century literature; I don't know how to judge 21st-century poetry on the merits of being 21st-century poetry. I don't really *like* 21st-century poetry.Since I cannot judge it as poetry, I find that I must judge it separately from its form and instead focus on the overall arc of the work. And I will have this to say: In a book that is structured around the inability to directly face death, two of Travelstead's poems stood out among the others. (No, it was not the poem about doing squats; I have done a number of squats in my life, and my surprise at seeing a poem about watching another man doing squats was profound, but it was not what struck me as being thematically significant; although, my inability to appreciate the exercise on the same level leads me to believe that I may be personally deficient in some way, so it was an effective poem in that respect). The titular poem, "How We Bury Our Dead" and "DuPont Paint Factory" were both poems in which the poet sought to look at death, rather than to find a distraction away from it.For me, these two poems, set where they were in the collection, were the highlights, because of the unexpected work that they produced. In the first, once the act of dying is complete, what is upsetting is the disassociation from what comes after. There were a few lines in "How We Bury Our Dead" that forced me to remember the grief of Adam Bede's mother from George Eliot's novel: "the body which was once packed on the dining room table with rosemary/ and lavender by the son so the family may then begin/ lowering the weight" struck me with the remembrance of Lisbeth's intense grief over her alcoholic husband's death, but inverted; in 1799, the family may know that "Our dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten them: they can be injured by us, they can be wounded; they know all our penitence, all our aching sense that their place is empty, all the kisses we bestow on the smallest relic of their presence" because of how personal and intimate the family-done funeral is, but Travelstead shows how painfully conscious he was of how these sorts of pleasures are denied to modern mourners, as we have anesthetized the entire process of the funeral.The second poem's subject matter was so gripping that, just as Travelstead was unable to look away from the dying man in "DuPont Paint Factory," I was likewise unable to stop reading. Again, appearing late in the work as this did, after experiencing the flight from death, viewing the truly awful death of this unknown man through Travelstead's eyes helped me to transition to the final section of the poetry, providing what I felt was the secondary crisis of this collection, the final goad into the present moment and the impetus that moves us into the final poem of the collection, the aptly named "Mitch's Motorcycle Salvage and Rebuild." I refuse to believe that this final poem's topic and title is not related to the rest of the work as a whole, as a closure of sorts. Not of a replacement or of even a restoration, but instead of a rescue and a cobbling together into something that let's the reader (and poet, perhaps) feel that there's a place to go from this point out.PS - Next time, I want more poems about weightlifting.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful. Possibly the upcoming of a new poet laureate... By Bryan A. Marchal Not only are these image-rich poems, but they tell a chronological story as they are pieced together throughout different points of time. An ingenious idea to keep one hooked and wanting to read more to find the conclusion. The struggle of the mind trying to reconcile the dying process of someone close, as these thoughts pervade every day life... it's haunting, breath-taking, and palpable in its honesty.
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