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by Thomas Lynch
The essays presented here explore the human condition in the modern age, beleaguered by choices and changes, encumbered by mergers and acquisitions, numbed by technologies, in search of the meaning of life. Lynch addresses life and time sextons, muckrakers, clergy, caskets, condoms, loved poems, a hated cat, the mall and Main Street. In an age that seeks to define human experience in retail, high-tech or pop-psyche terms, these essays speak to the existentials: between human being and ceasing to be, between birth and death, we are bodies in motion and at rest.
About the Author:
Thomas Lynch is a funeral director in Milford, Michigan, where he also resides. He is the author of “Skating With Heather Grace,” “Grimalkin And Other Poems” and his nonfiction book, “The Undertaking: Life Studies From The Dismal Trade.” His poems and essays have appeared in Harper’s, the London Review of Books, The New Yorker, the Paris Review and other periodicals.
Specifications:
- Binding: Softbound
- Size: 5 1/2" x 8"
- Pages: 275
- Illustrations: Frontispiece photographs and illustrations
Comments:
“Occasionally a book enters one's life at a particularly apt moment. Thomas Lynch’s book of essays arrived fortuitously on the day before my father died, and I carried it with me throughout the dark days that followed. I found his essays deeply consoling. To say they are wise and beautiful would be to understate the matter. Lynch brigs a vast accumulation of life-and-death wisdom to the table and he makes connections between art and mortality that reverberate in the mind. Few readers will walk away from this volume less than stunned and grateful.”
— Jay Parini
“Thomas Lynch contrives to be both passionate and wry, both serious and witty, in a way that's hard to define and impossible not to notice: This is that rarest of things nowadays, an original voice. His — what does one call them? — meditations, ruminations, riffs on the quick and the dead are fast becoming indispensable to our language and the bookshelf. A luminous work of words.”
— Nicholas Delbanco
“The eloquence of these studies, the ingenuity of these meditations and the wit of these terminations (surely the right word here) afford Lynch his continuity with Sir Thomas Browne and with Donne's Biathanatos: his plot, as is said is the trade, is neat, and his mortality remains.”
— Richard Howard
Table of Contents:
- Bodies in Motion and at Rest
- Sweeney Revisited
- Bible Studies
- Wombs
- The Bang & Whimper and the Boom
- The Way We Are
- Notes on “A Note on the Rapture to His True Love”
- Decca, Dinky, Benji & Me
- The Dead Priest
- Fish Stories
- The Blindness of Love
- Funerals-R-Us
- Johnny, We Hardly Knew You
- Y2Kat
- The Big Enchilada
- The Oak Grove Imbroglio
- Nora
- Reno
- Afterword
- Time Time Time
- Notes on Frontispieces
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