I, Afterlife: Essay in Mourning Time

Kristin Prevallet

Much admired by her contemporaries for her experiments in poetic form, Kristin Prevallet now turns these 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 lyricism of the elegy. Throughout, she offers a defiant refusal of easy consolations or redemptions. Driven by “the need to extend beyond the personal and out 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.”

“Here elegy and essay converge leaving only a sense of the poetic itself to comfort a person facing a catastrophic loss.”

— Fanny Howe

“The quietest and most intimate book by one of our best poets.”

— Forrest Gander

KRISTIN PREVALLET’S previous books include Shadow Evidence Intelligence (Factory School, 2006), Scratch Sides: Poetry, Documentation, and Image-Text Projects (Skanky Possum, 2002), and Perturbation, My Sister: A Study of Max Ernst’s Hundred Headless Woman (First Intensity, 1997). Her essays, poems, and translations have appeared in several magazines including Jacket, The Nation, Chain, Poetry New York, Poets and Writers, Conjunctions, Seneca Review, Bombay Gin and The Chicago Review. From 1994-1997, she served as one of four editors of apex of the M, a literary magazine based in Buffalo, NY that published six issues of exciting work from both emerging and more established writers. She recently co-edited Third Mind: Creative Writing Through Visual Art with Tonya Foster (Teachers & Writers, 2002), an anthology of essays about the challenges and rewards of uniting art and writing in the classroom. Her selected edition of Helen Adam’s ballade and collages, The Helen Adam Reader, has just been released by the National Poetry Foundation.