obituary
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Interrogating Grief: A Converstion with Victoria Chang
Victoria Chang discusses her new poetry collection, OBIT.
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A Looming Death
MacArthur Genius Grant recipient and Pulitzer-finalist poet Lucia Perillo has died at the age of 58, reports Michael Shaub in the LA Times. Perillo suffered from multiple sclerosis, and wrote about her “looming death” in her latest collection, Time Will…
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Let’s Reinvigorate Death
Julian Hanna reviews Stefany Anne Goldberg and Morgan Meis’s Dead People at 3:AM Magazine. The book eulogizes twenty-nine people Goldberg and Meis handpicked themselves with short obituaries. Hanna writes that the twenty-nine obituaries all offer, “something lively and curious.” Each is, “an…
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Looking Back at Albee
For the New Yorker, Hilton Als reaches across Edward Albee’s long career to take the pulse of the themes and concerns of the late, great playwright. Memory, attachment, cruelty, and Albee’s sense of himself as an outsider all informed the dramas. Als…
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At Heaven’s Gates
At the New Yorker, Richard Brody shares a eulogy for director Michael Cimino: Cimino’s life work is a cinema of mourning, an art of grief, a nightmare of memory that finds its sole redemption in ecstasy—the heightened perception that transforms experience into a…
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Suicide’s Alan Vega Passes On
Alan Vega of Suicide passed away this weekend, leaving us bereft of yet another irreplaceable figure in music. Henry Rollins announced the news on his website, sharing a statement from the Vega family mourning Vega’s loss: Alan’s life is a lesson of what it…
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In Memoriam: Headless Woman
Vincent Musetto, the author of the infamous New York Post headline, “Headless Woman in Topless Bar” died on June 9th. The New York Times has this obituary. The writers of newspaper headlines generally toil in anonymity, and over time a…
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R.I.P.: Washington Phillips
As a culture, we tend to place more significance on the mystique of death than the actual event. We avoid considering the details: the transportation of the body down to the morgue, the excising of the organs, the decay of…
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Ben E. King’s Legacy Remembered
Tributes to the soul singer have been flooding the Internet since his passing on Thursday, April 30. Many are beautiful, but possibly the most heart achingly gorgeous comes from almost two weeks prior to his death, when David Letterman asked Tracy…
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Remembrance: The Protector of Sci-Fi Poetry
Suzette Haden Elgin, the pioneering writer at the intersection of science fiction, linguistics, and activism, is remembered at io9 after her passing last week. Elgin leaves behind a body of work that is both fantastical and practical, escapist and activist; though…
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RIP Maggie Estep
Spoken word poet Maggie Estep has passed away. The Los Angeles Times has a wonderful write up of her life and career and how she shaped a whole movement. “In her early work, Estep was a downtown New Yorker who…
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John Updike: Writers Reflect
The Rumpus asked writers to share their thoughts on the work and legacy of John Updike, who died this week at the age of 76.