Paper Caskets

by Emilia Danielewska

Emilia Danielewska's debut book of prose-poetry reveals the dead. Divided into four parts, Paper Caskets proposes a poetics of the box -- as coffin, as prose parameters of the page, as photograph, and as state of mind and body in the face of death. From the act of photographing the dead, to mourning the dead, and to preparing for death that is coming, here is work startling in its clarity, which exposes, as a photograph does, the complicated relationship humans have with mortality.

Paper Caskets looks beyond grief to see the dead as dynamic places where memory and body collide, where flesh rots and fluid seeps and we de/compose prose-poetry.

Genres: Poetry

104 pages, Paperback

Published September 15, 2018

Reviews

[Dorothy Mahoney · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of prose poems that begins with photos taken at the turn of the century to memorialize
dead children. Danielewska is adept at description and capturing grief. The typography of a
small box removed from the text and added to a blank page is of particular interest. The book begins to read like a novel with the photographer as narrator but then a more modern parade of
characters are introduced in the exploration of death and how it arrives.

[Yasmin · Rating 4 out of 5]

An amazing collection of poems!

[Jbondandrews · Rating 3 out of 5]

Definitely a book of poetry with a difference. The poems almost felt like short stories and certainly the theme, especially the photos of the dead was intersting.