Paper Caskets

"Emilia Danielewska's debut book of prose-poetry reveals the dead. Divided into four parts, Paper Caskets proposes a poetics of the box--as coffin, as prose parameters of the page, as photograph, and as state of mind and body in the face of death. From the act of photographing the dead, to mourning the dead, and to preparing for death that is coming, here is work startling in its clarity, which exposes, as a photograph does, the complicated relationship humans have with mortality. As if Mary Roach's Stiff was a poetry book with the precise eye and steady voice of Robyn Sarah, Paper Caskets looks beyond grief to see the dead as dynamic places where memory and body collide, where flesh rots and fluid seeps and we de/compose prose-poetry."--