Condolences to all of you: Late eulogies of a half-complacent birthday boy.

摘要

Condolences to All of You assembles various poems whose creation spans the period between late 2011 and late 2014, with the vast majority formed during the latter half of that time. Included are conceptual poems of a visual or ideological nature, narrative poems exploring adolescence and ecology, and lyrical examinations of the crisis of mortality in the twenty-first century. Many of these darkly humorous poems obscure distinctions between elegy, eulogy, epitaph and celebration, while pleading for the imagination's affirmation in a human era of purported existential certainty. The essay preceding the poems debates their roles and merits among the flailing despair of twentieth century literary criticism, and puts forth a guide to formal and content-driven motives for the mechanics of the poems themselves.