Go To The Living (inlandia Books) [Paperback]

Go To The Living shines into the darkness of loss a fathers unwavering lament and deep affections. In poem after poem, Micah Chatterton gives voice and figure to the memory of a son, Ezra, whose short life is made vivid in koans and laments, elegies, invocations, fragments, lists, anecdotes, and seemingly absurd yet heartbreakingly candid hypotheticals (Who would win in a cubicle fight unarmed, Micah asks in July 27 3:41pm (Text), a Klingon or a Wookie?). Even as the memory of one life finds its unlikely parallel, beyond time and even feeling, in the beginning of another, Chattertons attentiveness to form and measure of grief never wavers. Im going to be a writer someday, Ezra says in Now, Someday, as he journeys to a summer camp for other children with cancer, where He wanted to see other / kids carved from the same soft wood / as him. As Chatterton observes in Kitchen Counter, Grief is learning just how weak and fragile words are, memory is. This beautiful, deeply felt collection locates in the memory of one life the beginning of the next, without ever yielding a shadow to either. --?John W. Evans, Author of The Consolations

The world trembles on. Micah Chatterton writes toward the end of this amazing book of poems. But to move past seismic loss, to tremble along with the world, to cherish and understand life despite the specific immediacy of loss, takes exceptional craft and character. Go To The Living is such an achievement in art, in lovein the great skill and music of the voice, which, in its clarity, invention, and deep attention to life is redemptive for us all. -Christopher Buckley

Micah Chattertons beautifully orchestrated, deeply elegiac first book chronicles what it means to be father of two sons who can never touch; it weaves in memories of the professor of anthropology for whom the poet was caregiver at the end of her long life. Go To the Living plumbs the ls*