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I, Afterlife: Essay in Mourning Time
Poetry. Essays. Much admired by her contemporaries for her experiments in poetic form, Kristin Prevallet now turns those gifts to the most vulnerable moments of her own life, and in doing so, has produced a testament that is both disconsolate and powerful. Meditating on her father's unexplained suicide, Prevallet alternates between the clinical language of the crime report and the lyricism of the elegy. Throughout, she offers a defiant refusal of east consolations or redemptions. Driven by "the need to extend beyond the personal and out the toward the intolerable present," Prevallet brings herself and her readers to the chilling but transcendent place where, as she promises, "darkness has its own resolutions." According to Fanny Howe, here elegy and essay "converge and there is left a beautiful sense of the poetic itself as all that is left to comfort a person facing a catastrophic loss." "This is the quietest and most intimate book by one of our best poets"--Forest Gander.
63 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2007
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Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
July 13, 2017
Modernist poet Kristin Prevallet’s father, beset by depression, shot himself in a parking lot; over six years, she wrote the essays and poems that make up this slim volume to help herself through the grieving process. Very touching.
February 7, 2021
In the past year, I have carried this book with me everywhere I went. I LOVE IT!!!
I, Afterlife is full of beautiful words webbed together to create a heart-breaking prose and poetry. This book is a window into the author's heart as she is healing after her father's loss... After her father's suicide. The first time I read this book, I was in tears, with a giant knot in my gut.... I felt Prevallet's pain and loss.
Perhaps I related to her pain...
Then, I found myself reading the book again and again... and so, finally, I started carrying it with me everywhere.
I had the pleasure of meeting the author and listened to her read out of the book. We talked for a long time about loss and healing. I walked away with a gift from her - a signed transcript - an un published poem. The kind and gentle spirit she had, seems to be the result of her experience and her healing.
Overall, this is a great book. Everyone that likes poetry (contemporary poetry) should read it at least once. For the non-poetry lovers, you should read it because it is based on a real experience!
I, Afterlife is full of beautiful words webbed together to create a heart-breaking prose and poetry. This book is a window into the author's heart as she is healing after her father's loss... After her father's suicide. The first time I read this book, I was in tears, with a giant knot in my gut.... I felt Prevallet's pain and loss.
Perhaps I related to her pain...
Then, I found myself reading the book again and again... and so, finally, I started carrying it with me everywhere.
I had the pleasure of meeting the author and listened to her read out of the book. We talked for a long time about loss and healing. I walked away with a gift from her - a signed transcript - an un published poem. The kind and gentle spirit she had, seems to be the result of her experience and her healing.
Overall, this is a great book. Everyone that likes poetry (contemporary poetry) should read it at least once. For the non-poetry lovers, you should read it because it is based on a real experience!
August 15, 2022
"As a political position, I hold on to grief. The objects in my shrine represent this. I don't see it so much as holding on to my dead parents, but rather as holding on to an awareness of spatial distance."
I felt it was a bit too explanatory at times & I feel like essay as a form attempts to do something that grief as a concept cannot abide by. It was most effective when it attempted to steer away from the philosophizing & telling and instead into the experience of grief itself.
I felt it was a bit too explanatory at times & I feel like essay as a form attempts to do something that grief as a concept cannot abide by. It was most effective when it attempted to steer away from the philosophizing & telling and instead into the experience of grief itself.
July 3, 2022
I really like the mixture of poetry and prose in this book. One of my favorite passage from which the book title comes: "...people die every day from the lack of poetry in faith. In doubting the possibility of a tidy afterlife, I have come to compose a fragmented system of believing. I call this poetry." I highly recommend this book to anyone grieving the loss of a loved one.
January 9, 2026
I want to like this book more than I do, much of it appeals to me conceptually, but that's really the thing... Describing what you want your poems to do, theorizing about what elegies are, about how language fails to turn absence into presence, about the difficulties of sublimation, isn't the same thing as actually doing it and making those failures operative. Much of this book is self-aware of that ("This gesture of approach is the closest you will get to the other side."), maybe that self-awareness is part of the problem, knowing up front language isn't up to the task ("Believing that holes can be filled with language is dangerous - only space itself occupies empty spaces." or "Language fills in the desire to alter time. This creates distance: using words even when it seems that there are no words that could possibly express the suffering associated with loss. Distance is not a means to 'express' nor a means to 'represent' what is missing - it's a way to fill in the space left when something that was once visible has disappeared and left a gap." or again "The poetry of my language is broken by the realization that it can do nothing more than fill in the division between silence and pain with arbitrary, black-and-white letters."). Stating an impossibility isn't the same as actually running up against that impossibility. Its almost the opposite: trying to get in front of that failure by preempting the impossibility. An excessive insistence on the impossibility of security is itself ironically an attempt at security. It's strange to analytically take critical distance to clearly describe your own "broken language." I'm very invested in the experiences this book wants to produce, but these analytical moments took me out. I think other authors like Maggie Nelson (Bluets, The Argonauts) have blurred this line between theory, memoir, and poetry with more success. I think other authors like Judith Butler (Speaking of Rage and Grief) have theorized on these concepts with more success. I think other authors like Anne de Marcken (It Lasts Forever and then Its Over) have poetically produced the experience of grief transforming into an opening that takes one beyond themselves with more success.
What Prevallet describes in this book is that if we are going to turn absence/loss into presence/form (by writing or otherwise) there are two ways to do it. One is the false promise of fullness closure and permanence, the other "holds on to an awareness of spatial distance" and this alternative is poetry/elegy and this is a political ethical position. ("As a political position, I hold on to grief.")
I like this ethic. It's an ethic about an "open closure," an ethic that recognizes the "need to extend beyond the personal and out towards the intolerable present," that wants to "find in holes a certain kind of completion." It recognizes the lie and violence of every promise of closure (playing on the multiple senses: closure as in completed mourning, as in a closed discursive system, as in a reified closed individual, as in safety and permanence). It recognizes the intolerable grief and insecurity that comes with openness, that comes with existing in the present. It recognizes the mourning involved in getting and staying there, the endlessness of the task, and the impossibility of it.
What Prevallet describes in this book is that if we are going to turn absence/loss into presence/form (by writing or otherwise) there are two ways to do it. One is the false promise of fullness closure and permanence, the other "holds on to an awareness of spatial distance" and this alternative is poetry/elegy and this is a political ethical position. ("As a political position, I hold on to grief.")
I like this ethic. It's an ethic about an "open closure," an ethic that recognizes the "need to extend beyond the personal and out towards the intolerable present," that wants to "find in holes a certain kind of completion." It recognizes the lie and violence of every promise of closure (playing on the multiple senses: closure as in completed mourning, as in a closed discursive system, as in a reified closed individual, as in safety and permanence). It recognizes the intolerable grief and insecurity that comes with openness, that comes with existing in the present. It recognizes the mourning involved in getting and staying there, the endlessness of the task, and the impossibility of it.
Read
December 31, 2024Articulated sm about grief that I’ve been living and thinking about without language
May 13, 2025
3 and 1/2 stars out of 5.
November 1, 2025
“As a political position, I hold on to grief.”
February 26, 2011
Poetry and dense essayistic paragraphs are blended along with distorted, ashy photographs.
The pointillism of
"The lack is consumed with his thoughts. / I now believe that this world is nothing more than a means of being in another. / There is the orchestra, the lawn, and the buzz" (6)
Gives way to prose determined to make definitive statements about grief, society, and memory: "Putting a form to something that is absent (i.e. writing a poem to stand in for the emptiness felt when someone close to you dies) happens in the social realm as well. There are monuments..."(52).
The poetry to give you the raw edges of grief, how rangy it makes one's thinking. Much of the first half of the book is moving. The prose of the second half serves to locate and quarantine grief, make pronouncements about it. (And I found the idea of a private shrine, a way to physically manifest grief in a container that can shift and change as opposed to the monumental nature of a headstone as fascinating, useful).
But, in a way, the essays shut down the poetry, provide too handy of a map to navigating its ambiguities. If I say the form doesn't work here I worry that this is simply my bias for poetry and language which enacts instead of language which meditates upon....Perhaps I am reading this in the wrong spirit. In many ways, this reads as its own kind of guidebook / counter-pamphlet for those grieving or seeking to "come to terms" w/grief (or, at points, those seeking to think about the writing out of grief, "the elegy" --"Afterlife is a tidy package that presents a simple truth. Elegy is the complexity of what is actually left behind"), so it is of course direct/directive. I dunno.
The pointillism of
"The lack is consumed with his thoughts. / I now believe that this world is nothing more than a means of being in another. / There is the orchestra, the lawn, and the buzz" (6)
Gives way to prose determined to make definitive statements about grief, society, and memory: "Putting a form to something that is absent (i.e. writing a poem to stand in for the emptiness felt when someone close to you dies) happens in the social realm as well. There are monuments..."(52).
The poetry to give you the raw edges of grief, how rangy it makes one's thinking. Much of the first half of the book is moving. The prose of the second half serves to locate and quarantine grief, make pronouncements about it. (And I found the idea of a private shrine, a way to physically manifest grief in a container that can shift and change as opposed to the monumental nature of a headstone as fascinating, useful).
But, in a way, the essays shut down the poetry, provide too handy of a map to navigating its ambiguities. If I say the form doesn't work here I worry that this is simply my bias for poetry and language which enacts instead of language which meditates upon....Perhaps I am reading this in the wrong spirit. In many ways, this reads as its own kind of guidebook / counter-pamphlet for those grieving or seeking to "come to terms" w/grief (or, at points, those seeking to think about the writing out of grief, "the elegy" --"Afterlife is a tidy package that presents a simple truth. Elegy is the complexity of what is actually left behind"), so it is of course direct/directive. I dunno.
July 22, 2011
With this work of lyrical non-fiction, Kristin Prevallet has written a moving elegy to the suicide of her father in much the same way that Roland Barthes grieved the death of his mother in his stellar text, Camera Lucida. She does for contemporary poetry what Barthes does for photography, but much less explicitly. Hers is not a critique of poetic style, but manifests its style lyrically in essay form. Her book reminds me of Beth Bachmann's Temper in its ability to grip the reader when confronting the death of a loved one. Prevallet is not excessively mournful, not lugubrious, but measured in her writing, as she studies the meaning elegy has created in her life. Kudos to Essay Press for publishing such an excellent piece for their small collection of publications.
August 10, 2011
I had to read this book for class, and was not expecting to find much in its 63 pages but was wonderfully mistaken. I found many thought provoking and interesting passages in this book. I live in Denver, and will never again look towards Littleton without thinking, "Someone's father died there, he drove to a park and shot himself in the face." Written during a time when the author's mind was shattered, the book translates suffering, pain, emptiness, and offers a view of the world through the cloudy lens of grief.
December 10, 2012
I want and need to read this book again. It's very challenging, both intellectually and emotionally, but also deeply rewarding, and I suspect that it would really reward multiple readings. Didn't have time to read it straight through, as I'd have liked, but am going to try to do this. I'm struck by the author's courage... in making a book so unlike any other I've read, in struggling visibly to tell the truth about her father's death, in not settling for any easy answers or forms.
July 3, 2008
I could only read a few pages of this book at a time; the subject matter and its handling were so overwhelming. Prevallet confronts grief and loss with such courage, and her unwavering poetic eye demands to know how language consoles, if it can at all. What an exacting cut into the heart of being human and being an artist, sharp and deadly accurate.
May 7, 2010
There's no way to criticize a book with such serious subject matter without coming off as a huge asshole, so I'll just say that a lot of this failed to keep my interest, and I thought the introduction explaining the details of her father's death does the rest of this a disservice, since it all seems redundant after that.
August 16, 2010
I must admit the book cover sold me, but what is inside still haunts me. The emotional clarity of grief becomes tangible in this small tome about the struggle to overcome her father's suicide. A brilliant elegy.
March 12, 2008
heartbreaking
August 31, 2009
This is a must, and is part of my MFA thesis reading stack. In other words, I'm concentrating and carrying five books around and this is one of them. That's how _good_ it is.
February 14, 2010
Formally amazing and emotionally wrenching. The poem as essay as investigation as vehicle for the deepest grief.
July 14, 2013
Too beautiful to describe right now.
April 29, 2017
Un ensayo. Una elegía. Una resistencia. Un escribir cara a cara con la muerte del padre. Un fantasma.
Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews