Bring Out Your Dead: Elegies from the Plague Year

Bring Out Your Dead: Elegies from the Plague Year - Paperback

$32.35
$32.35
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Bring Out Your Dead: Elegies from the Plague Year
  • Bring Out Your Dead: Elegies from the Plague Year
Bring Out Your Dead: Elegies from the Plague Year - Paperback

Bring Out Your Dead: Elegies from the Plague Year - Paperback

by Chad Davidson
$32.35
$32.35

Book Overview

by Chad Davidson (Author)

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.

Author Biography

Chad Davidson is the author of the essay collection Terra Cognita: Dispatches from an Over-Traveled Italy and four volumes of poetry, most recently Unearth. He lives in Carrollton, Georgia.

Number of Pages: 186
Dimensions: 0.43 x 8.5 x 5.5 IN
Publication Date: January 31, 2024
ISBN9780807181263
Author Chad Davidson
PublisherLSU Press
GenreBiography and Literature
FormatPaperback
PublishedJanuary 2024
LanguageENG- English
Pages186
Weight1.0 lb
Target AudienceAdults
Print SizeStandard Print

Related Subjects

Biography & Autobiography Literary Collections Nonfiction

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More by Chad Davidson

Terra Cognita: Dispatches from an Over-Traveled Italy

Terra Cognita: Dispatches from an Over-Traveled Italy - Paperback

Terra Cognita: Dispatches from an Over-Traveled Italy - Paperback

By Chad Davidson

About Chad Davidson

Chad Davidson is the author of four collections of poems, most recently Unearth. His essays have appeared in AGNI, the Antioch Review, Five Points, and the Gettysburg Review. He directs the School of the Arts at the University of West Georgia near Atlanta and codirects Convivio, a summer writing conference in Postignano, Italy.

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