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Death Poems
an anthology release and reading event

Wednesday, November 6
7:30 p.m.
Free and open to the public

Pretty much every poet in every age has written about death and dying. Along with love, it might be the most popular subject in poetry. Yet, until now, no anthology has gathered the best and most famous of these verses in one place.

The collection Death Poems, edited by Russ Kick, contains more than 320 poems, ranging from ancient times to today, across countries, languages, and schools of poetry. You’ll find a plethora of approaches—witty, humorous, deadly serious, tear-jerking, wise, profound, angry, spiritual, atheistic, uncertain, highly personal, political, mythic, earthy, and only occasionally morbid.

Every angle you can think of is covered—the  deaths of children, lost loves, funeral rites, close calls, eating meat, serial killers, the death penalty, roadkill, the Underworld, reincarnation, elegies for famous people, death as an equalizer, death as a junk man, death as a child, the death of God, the death of death . . . .

Poets past and present include Jane Austen, Willis Barnstone, Charles Baudelaire, William Blake, Charlotte Brontë, Lord Byron, Lucille Clifton, Andrei Codrescu, Wanda Coleman, Billy Collins, Emily Dickinson, John Donne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, T.S. Eliot, Nick Flynn, Benjamin Franklin, Robert Frost, Kimiko Hahn, Homer, Victor Hugo, Langston Hughes, James Joyce, C.S. Lewis, Amy Lowell, W.S. Merwin, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Pablo Neruda, Thich Nhat Hanh, Friedrich Nietzsche, Rainer Maria Rilke, Christina Rossetti, Rumi, Sappho, Shakespeare, Wallace Stevens, Ruth Stone, Wislawa Szymborska, Walt Whitman, W.B. Yeats, and a few hundred more.

We'll be celebrating the release of Death Poems on November 6, shortly after Samhain, All Hallow's Eve, the Day of the Dead, and All Saints & Souls Days. Russ will discuss the book's themed chapters and read a bunch of poems. Guest readers will also take a turn at the podium, reading some of the greatest poems about death, including "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" by Dylan Thomas and "Traveling through the Dark" by William Stafford.

Among the guest readers:

Wendy Burk is the author of the poetry chapbooks The Deer and The Place Names the Place Named. She is the recipient of a 2013 NEA Literature Fellowship to translate Contracorriente, a book of poems by Tedi López Mills.

 

 

 

Hannah Ensor is from Ann Arbor, Michigan, and received her MFA in poetry at the University of Arizona. She has poems in print and online in Bat City Review, Cutbank, Spork Press, and Apartment Poetry, among others. Along with being a member of the deep-ocean noise-pop duo Algae & Tentacles, she is also a co-editor of textsound.org, and serves on the board of directors of Casa Libre en la Solana.

 

 

Cybele Knowles writes essays, stories, screenplays, and poems. Her work has appeared in The Destroyer, Diagram, Spiral Orb, Pindeldyboz, The Asian Pacific American Journal, Faucheuse, and The Prose Poem. She studied literature and writing at UC Berkeley and the University of Arizona. She works as a program coordinator at the UA Poetry Center.

 

 

 

Julie Lauterbach-Colby writes essays, makes collages, and gardens in Tucson, AZ. She works at the University of Arizona Poetry Center. Her most recent work has appeared in Lost Magazine, Diagram, Essay Daily, and Cutbank.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Eric Magrane is the founding editor of Spiral Orb and Poet-in-Residence at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. He is pursuing a PhD in the University of Arizona School of Geography and Development, where he works on geopoetics and is a 2013-2014 Carson Fellow.

 

 

 

Kristen Nelson is a founder and the executive director of Casa Libre. She is the author of Write, Dad, a chapbook published by Unthinkable Creatures Press in 2012. She has recently published work in Drunken Boat, The Volta, Jupiter 88, Taurpaulin Sky, Trickhouse, Denver Quarterly, among others.