Description

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A National Book Award Finalist



"One of the most life-affirming books I have read in a long time…brims with humanity, irreverence, and invigorating candor." —Tom Vanderbilt

"Every year I bury a couple hundred of my townspeople." So opens this singular and wise testimony. Like all poets, inspired by death, Thomas Lynch is, unlike others, also hired to bury the dead or to cremate them and to tend to their families in a small Michigan town where he serves as the funeral director.

In the conduct of these duties he has kept his eyes open, his ear tuned to the indispensable vernaculars of love and grief. In these twelve pieces his is the voice of both witness and functionary. Here, Lynch, poet to the dying, names the hurts and whispers the condolences and shapes the questions posed by this familiar mystery. So here is homage to parents who have died and to children who shouldn't have. Here are golfers tripping over grave markers, gourmands and hypochondriacs, lovers and suicides. These are the lessons for life our mortality teaches us.

About the Author

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Thomas Lynch’s stories, poems, and essays have appeared in Granta, the Atlantic, Harper’s, the New York Times, and elsewhere. His first collection of essays, The Undertaking, was a finalist for the National Book Award. Lynch lives in Milford, Michigan.

Praise For…

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A startling and eloquent meditation on death and bereavement…If you think this book isn't about you, or for you, think again.
— Spin

Forceful, authentic, and full of a kind of ethical and aesthetic clarity.
— Richard Bernstein - New York Times

A memoir that is stand-out superb.
— Esquire

[Lynch] is able to take us inside the palpable business of blood, tears, and the final verse of life in a manner that is almost shocking in the relief it delivers…[A] fine, sensible, and wise book.
— Boston Globe

Lynch’s vivid prose has the electricity of writing that tells us what is going on in the secret places of the community—and the secret places of the heart.
— USA Today

[Lynch] brings the lessons of death to life, and turns life and death into art.
— Time Out New York

Lynch’s essays are consistently humane and observant of the tragic, humorous, and occasionally startling vagaries of human life…Highly recommended reading for fans of poetry, Ireland, funeral and cultural customs, or anything else. More than a study of ‘the dismal trade,’ it is a long view of what it means to be human.
— Detroit Free Press

[An] unusual and affecting book. Lynch writes beautifully and affectingly…Each of the book’s chapters…enchants and instructs while enlightening us in the ways of living, dying, and most important, in Lynch’s anything-but-dismal view, loving.
— Elle

[Lynch] devotes most of his finely composed pages to gently humorous and unabashedly affectionate portraits of the people he loves…[A] collection of powerful and cadenced essays.
— Chicago Tribune