Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Bring Out Your Dead: Elegies from the Plague Year

Bring Out Your Dead: Elegies from the Plague Year

Davidson, Chad

Paperback

Biographies GeneralLetters & EssaysFiction Anthologies

Publisher Price: $29.95

ISBN10: 0807181269
ISBN13: 9780807181263
Publisher: LSU Press
Published: Jan 31 2024
Pages: 186
Weight: 0.53
Height: 0.43 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English

Could the shlock-rock '70s band Kiss in any way affect the outcome of a death-dealing twenty-first-century virus? Is Bob Ross--that permed, inimitable painter of Edenic nostalgia on PBS--actually an emissary from the land of personal loss? Might the work of Edward Hopper reflect facets of a global plague? What is the grammar, finally, of grief, of isolation?

The essays in Chad Davidson's Bring Out Your Dead: Elegies from the Plague Year mainly concern the loss of the author's father directly before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the ways in which the pandemic itself provided a strangely ideal backdrop to grieving. Refracted through the kaleidoscopic, yet strangely stagnant, isolation period in the first year of COVID, his father's death--another plague visited on the author--found its way into all his waking hours, coloring whatever he tried to write, particularly when he tried not to let it. Friends both lost and nearly so, the burning of Notre Dame in Paris, even the seemingly inconsequential discovery of a rash of chew toys in the yard: these events assumed an unmistakable gravity, considered in the midst of a pandemic and the ruins of personal grief.

Bring Out Your Dead adds Davidson's father to the growing list of loved ones lost in--and, in this case, right before--the pandemic. It's a personal memorial, given over to a father's memory and the grief endured while living through dueling plagues (one viral, the other psychological). In the end, the book becomes more about the ways we eulogize, how we remember those who are gone, why their memories persist, and what summons them back into our thoughts, our language, and our lives.

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Letters & Essays

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