The poems in The After-Death History of My Mother involve the work of mourning. They come to terms with mortality and reparation for acute loss in surreal, dream-like encounters between the living and the departed. McIntosh confronts the constraints imposed by history on the present and loosens those strictures through the charms of his imagination. An elegantly crafted long poem, “Obsessional” records intriguing detective work on Tudor English literary history and assesses the nature of how art is created, by whom, and under what circumstances.
In The After Death History of My Mother, McIntosh constructs a tender, uncanny memoir of grief and imagination, tracing the ways a parent’s presence lingers long after they’re gone. It’s intimate, wry, and quietly astonishing—a book that invites readers to consider how stories keep the dead vividly alive.
“Sandy McIntosh’s entertaining new volume might be mistaken, at first, for a merry romp through personal and literary history conducted by a slightly confused, well-meaning people-pleaser. His confusion begins with his bemused revelation that he has (maybe) two mothers, and continues through various other doublings (dream transformations, reincarnations, literary ‘forgeries,’ literary mothers both male and female, poems masquerading as prose and vice versa) to a final doubling (double-crossing) that brings with it a ‘broade [sic] awaking’ to reality…. This is a book of elegies eulogies, really to all the literal and literary bastards who have made McIntosh an artist and (maybe) a con.”
–Laurel Blossom, American Book Review
$10.00
