How We Bury Our Dead

by Jonathan Travelstead

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

Genres: Poetry

100 pages, Paperback

First published March 10, 2015

Reviews

[Erin Macauley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Travelstead's first book, a narrative collection of poems, bears witness to the necessary depth and breadth of the journey taken when seeking peace with death of a loved one. A journey complicated for any of us by the fact that, as Travelstead writes in "Martinez," "you never get the grace of picking who it is you love."

Broken into four parts, this collection weaves parallel-structured free verse poetry that sings with the precision of carefully chosen words. Follow along and feel everything from the blast of desert heat to the sub-zero loneliness of Alaska winter; from the empty, intangible weight of loss to the coarse heft of a fireman's tools.

[John Holst · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful collections of poetry written by a deep and insightful author. Each poem is worthy of several reads as the reader discovers the layers of thought shared. The experience of grief and the pain that goes with is expressed in Jonathan's poems.

[Ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

What we lose when we are exposed to death and fear.

More - http://bentanzer.blogspot.com/2015/05...

[C · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really liked this collection of war and what we run from. I will be looking forward to reading more from this poet in the future.

[Kathline · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jonathan Travelstead's new collection of heart-wrenching, brutally honest poetry makes good on its title promise to illuminate "How We Bury Our Dead." The work within confronts death and grief, directly or through sidelong glances, down alleys of bracing self-destruction. What is really remarkable is the craft with which Travelstead turns painful material into masterfully written gems is barely seen; they are so engrossing, you will forget you are reading poems and not looking directly into a brave and resilient heart.

[Michael Van Kerckhove · Rating 5 out of 5]

Character driven and gritty.