I, Afterlife

Poetry. Essays. Much admired by her contemporaries for her experiments in poetic form, Kristin Prevallet now turns those gifts to the most vulnerable moments of her own life, and in doing so, has produced a testament that is both disconsolate and powerful. Meditating on her father's unexplained suicide, Prevallet alternates between the clinical language of the crime report and the lyricism of the elegy. Throughout, she offers a defiant refusal of east consolations or redemptions. Driven by "the need to extend beyond the personal and out the toward the intolerable present," Prevallet brings herself and her readers to the chilling but transcendent place where, as she promises, "darkness has its own resolutions." According to Fanny Howe, here elegy and essay "converge and there is left a beautiful sense of the poetic itself as all that is left to comfort a person facing a catastrophic loss." "This is the quietest and most intimate book by one of our best poets"--Forest Gander.

Kristin Prevallet (born in 1966 in Denver) is an American poet and essayist who currently lives and works in New York City. Prevallet studied with Robert Creeley at SUNY Buffalo and has described herself as working in the tradition of William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson and the ongoing stream of American high modernists. In recent years, she has appeared regularly at the Bowery Poetry Club, the venue which defined the New York downtown poetry scene in the late 90s and early 00s. In her academic life, she has taught at Bard College, The New School for Social Research, and currently at St. John's University in Queens. She has also lectured and performed frequently at the Jack Kerouac School at Naropa University (formerly The Naropa Institute) in Boulder, Colorado.