A read for anyone who's ever thought about the topic, Death and Other Speculative Fictions: An Essay in Prose Poems is often warm, funny, and seriously playful. Its main concern is the death and possible fictive resurgence of Caroline Hagood's beloved father. This is truly a volume of prose poetry, each entry a whole in itself. You could flip to any chapter (each a fraction of a page long) and find insight and entertainment. Yet each segment talks to the others in many voices; as the subtitle states, this is also an essay, and it reveals much in the sequential reading.
First and foremost, there’s the throughline of cultural depictions of death, from Cicero to Nabokov to Blade Runner. The book takes cues from James Joyce's Ulysses to Dracula to the latest Mad Max joint, Furiosa. Then there’s the voice of Hagood as the mother of young children, doing everyday, motherly things as she disbelieves the very idea of life without her own father—another abiding theme. There's a coming to terms with death and life, the spectacular in the mundane (I think particularly of Hagood's journey to her father's deathbed, which takes place over multiple chapters and the fringes of reality).
For Hagood, her father's death is ultimately a crisis that plays out on more than one level. It's emotional, of course, but it's also existential. She's a writer, and a professor of writing, who now understands the inadequacy of words. "It really takes a tragedy to make you see that words never really encompass us." This is a development from the book's beginning, where Hagood called the book an attempt to conjure up her dead father, to meet him on another plane. Ironically, it's her poetic ascension to a plane where distinctions between life and death fade that also shows her the failure of words. She's written herself into surpassing writing.
"We are all linked…there aren't as many distinctions as I once thought. Everything is permeable" between people, between people and the world, between life and death. "Death has taught me the true architecture. Now, when I walk around Brooklyn, I imagine the roof and walls of all the apartment buildings removed, revealing the people crouched inside, trying to be people, so close to others while not realizing it, not actually alone." Hagood expects to settle with the physical reality of death as simply and magically as being a mother: "When it finally comes, bedraggled, I will take it into me as I've soothed my terrified children so many times by the smell of my skin alone."
In the 100-odd prose-poem chapters, there's plenty of space for humor here, and lightness, in addition to satisfying resolution. It's an enlightening and emboldening read. You might wind up feeling that Hagood is a friend, so welcoming and delightful is her voice. And you'll definitely appreciate, with her, "how every instant we get is a shattering miracle."
Kate Oden is a freelance translator and writer who also reports for the Valley News*. She’s currently at work on a novel.*