Among Dead Things by Celia Lawren

One of the most important talents a poet can possess is to turn tragedy into art.

–Don Cushman, author of Visitation (St.Martin’s Press) and The Jacob Papers (Cloud Marauder Press)

Celia Lawren’s Among Dead Things is a remarkable chronicle of tragedy and resilience. “Losses accumulate like stacks of dirty dishes. There’s nothing to do but stand at the sink, wash each one, and place it in the rack,”  she writes in “Legacy of Losses.” With courage and compassion, these poems unfold the story of a daughter’s car accident and its devastating consequences. Like “Shards and broken threads pieced together…” each offers the reader a glimpse of “an open wound that never heals.” And yet, there are flickers of hope. In “Bounty,” Celia Lawren writes, “Another summer, and my daughter’s still in prison, surviving like a seedling stuck in a Dixie cup.”  Among Dead Things  is a wise book, not grasping after redemption, but embracing an honesty that feels, at times, like grace. 

–Ellen Bass, author of Indigo (out in 2020), Like a Beggar, The Human Line and Mules of Love

Even the angels grieve in Celia Lawren’s heartwrenchingly honest collection of wounds, losses, and the kinds of courage needed to face such traumas. In Among Dead Things, “Losses accumulate / like stacks of dirty dishes” and bodies thrash, ravage, howl. It’s brutal. Lawren’s greatest gift to us is a clear focus on the details, which paint intimate portraits of human tragedies, putting real faces to such overpowering existential fears. I dare anyone to read these poems and not be shaken and moved.

–John Sibley Williams, author of As One Fire Consumes Another and Skin Memory