The Grief Artist

For fans of Six Feet Under and Caitlin Doughty’s From Here to Eternity comes a meditation on grief, death, and art by award-winning author Traci Brimhall

The Grief Artist is the nonfiction debut from award-winning poet Traci Brimhall. This essay collection is a meditation about grief, death, art and how we live today in contemporary American culture. Brimhall travels around the country visiting ghost towns, haunted houses, hospice patients and devotees of the paranormal in pursuit of a collective understanding of death, dying, and grief. Brimhall examines the wreaths and tableaux of Victorian mourners, death photography and mourning fashions. She attempts to talk to the dead and visits a museum of haunted objects in the effort to experience something spiritual and uncanny. She makes blankets for hospice patients and interviews supernaturalists all while trying to understand her own grief and asks the questions, how do we grieve communally and is it even possible? Through personal story, historical research and cultural analysis Brimhall makes a case for a collective understanding of death and mourning but her book is also, like Molly McCully Brown says, a “wild catalog of ‘reasons for living,’” Brimhall’s The Grief Artist is a fierce, soulful, and a necessary book for today’s world.