I PICKED THIS up because I admired "Obituary for Dead Languages," a...lyric essay? prose poem?...anyway, it ran in Conjunctions, and I admired it.
As the title Post-Mortem suggests, the theme of the book is writing based on someone or something having died. Seven poems have "obituary" in the title, two have the word "kaddish," two more have the word "autopsy," and we also have "After Poetry Died" and "The Death of Beauty."
The poems in the earlier part of the book are witty and inventive, so I was thinking of the theme as playfully dark or darkly playful, but in Part IV it gradually becomes clear that Altfeld and her partner lost one of their kids. Reading those poems, I felt like my heart fell into a deep hole. That Altfeld was able to write about the event at all astonished me, to say nothing of how powerfully she wrote about it, how moving the poems are.
She has published a few more essays in Conjunctions, and I enjoyed those, but I wonder if another poetry collection is on the way. I hope one is.
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