Every year I bury a couple hundred of my townspeople. So opens this singular and wise testimony. Like all poets, inspired by death, Thomas Lynch is, unlike others, also hired to bury the dead or to cremate them and to tend to their families in a small Michigan town where he serves as the funeral director.

In the conduct of these duties he has kept his eyes open, his ear tuned to the indispensable vernaculars of love and grief. In these twelve pieces his is the voice of both witness and functionary. Here, Lynch, poet to the dying, names the hurts and whispers the condolences and shapes the questions posed by this familiar mystery. So here is homage to parents who have died and to children who shouldn't have. Here are golfers tripping over grave markers, gourmands and hypochondriacs, lovers and suicides. These are the lessons for life our mortality teaches us.

Thomas Lynch, poet, funeral director, and author of the highly praised The Undertaking, winner of an American Book Award and finalist for the National Book Award, continues to examine the relations between the literary and mortuary arts.

A selection of the very best from one of America's most thought-provoking writers: poems on life, faith, doubt, and death that read like memoir, essay, and story. As The New York Times said, likely to resonate with many who have come face to face with life's most important questions.

Thomas Lynch--like Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams--is a poet who writes about real things with language rooted in the everyday yet masterfully infused with power:

I have steady work, a circle of friends
and lunch on Thursdays with the Rotary.
I have a wife, unspeakably beautiful,
a daughter and three sons, a cat, a car,
good credit, taxes, and mortgage payments
and certain duties here. Notably,
when folks get horizontal, breathless, still:
life in Milford ends. They call. I send a car.

Thomas Lynch spent his career as an undertaker in Midwest America--and in his off-hours became a writer of exceptional insight. Publishers Weekly calls him, A poet with something to say and something worth listening to. This collection presents 140 of his greatest poems drawn from his previous books, Skating with Heather Grace, Still Life in Milford, Grimalkin, The Sin-Eater, and Walking Papers. This is a collection for readers who love all life's questions and mysteries--big and small.

Thomas Lynch's poems take us under the apparent world to where consciousness is alive and shimmering with joy and loss, blindness and epiphany.--Billy Collins

Part memoir, part cultural study, Booking Passage is a brilliant, often comedic guidebook for those fellow travelers, fellow pilgrims making their way through the complexities of their own lives and times.

From one of our most gifted writers and thinkers about death and the meaning of living comes a collection of writings about what comes next. Thomas Lynch, funeral director, poet, and author of the National Book Award finalist The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade, has an uncanny knack for writing about death in ways that are never morbid, always thoughtful, often humorous, and quite moving. From his account of riding in the hearse at the funeral of poet laureate Seamus Heaney, to his recounting of the funeral for a young child in the 1800s, to his compelling essay about his own mortality, Lynch always finds ways to make sense of senseless things, as he ponders what will come next.

Hegel's philosophy of religion contains an implicit political theology. When viewed in connection with his wider work on subjectivity, history and politics, this political theology is a resource for apocalyptic thinking. In a world of climate change, inequality, oppressive gender roles and racism, Hegel can be used to theorise the hope found in the end of that world.

Histories of apocalyptic thinking draw a line connecting the medieval prophet Joachim of Fiore and Marx. This line passes through Hegel, who transforms the relationship between philosophy and theology by philosophically employing theological concepts to critique the world. Jacob Taubes provides an example of this Hegelian political theology, weaving Christianity, Judaism and philosophy to develop an apocalypticism that is not invested in the world. Taubes awaits the end of the world knowing that apocalyptic destruction is also a form of creation. Catherine Malabou discusses this relationship between destruction and creation in terms of plasticity. Using plasticity to reformulate apocalypticism allows for a form of apocalyptic thinking that is immanent and materialist.

Together Hegel, Taubes and Malabou provide the resources for thinking about why the world should end. The resulting apocalyptic pessimism is not passive, but requires an active refusal of the world.

For nearly four decades, poet, essayist, and small-town funeral director Thomas Lynch has probed relations between the literary and mortuary arts with a signature blend of memoir, meditation, gallows humor, and poetic precision. The Depositions offers a wry and compassionate selection from Lynch's four previous collections of nonfiction, along with new essays shaped by the press of the author's own mortality.

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An aged trade embalmer discovers a new connection to life. As a husband, he promised his dying wife he'd write their story of love and grief, sweetness, sadness. Twenty-five years later, he may not have a first sentence for the story of their marriage but he does have the start of a loving final chapter of his own.

If sex and the dead, as Yeats instructed, are topics worthy of a serious mind, then Doyle Shields has a very serious mind indeed. His professional work was preparing the dead for their funerals, while his passion was pleasing his beloved partners. First, there was monogamous joy with Sally and then, after years of bereavement, after giving up on love and its blessings, there was Johanna, whose lovemaking makes Doyle believe in a life of the spirit.

Still life, as Doyle learned as a young combat Marine, takes no prisoners. It comes and goes and goes on with or without our participation or approval. And Doyle, approaching his end, is haunted by the wounds of the war fought in his youth.

Award-winning writer and poet, Thomas Lynch, has wrought a sprawling, enthralling first novel about the pursuit of meaning, purpose, redemption and forgiveness, and the search for beauty in an imperfect world. It is for any reader who believes such quests can end in splendid victory. As Doyle feels God whisper, Wait and see.

For nearly four decades, poet, essayist, and small-town funeral director Thomas Lynch has probed relations between the literary and mortuary arts. His life's work with the dead and the bereaved has informed four previous collections of nonfiction, each exploring identity and humanity with Lynch's signature blend of memoir, meditation, gallows humor, and poetic precision.

The Depositions provides an essential selection from these masterful collections--essays on fatherhood, Irish heritage, funeral rites, and the perils of bodiless obsequies--as well as new essays in which the space between Lynch's hyphenated identities--as an Irish American, undertaker-poet--is narrowed by the deaths of poets, the funerals of friends, the loss of neighbors, intimate estrangements, and the slow demise of a beloved dog.

In Gladstone, from The Undertaking, Lynch reflects on his then twenty-five years as an undertaker at the Midwinter Conference for Michigan funeral directors, which incongruously takes place on an island in the Caribbean. With brutal, generous honesty, The Way We Are, from Bodies in Motion and at Rest, grapples with Lynch's time as a single parent coming to terms with generations of his family inheritance of alcoholism and recovery. The press of the author's own mortality animates the new essays, sharpening a curiosity about where we come from, where we go, and what it means.

As Alan Ball writes in a penetrating foreword, Lynch's work allows us to see both the absurdity and the beauty of death, sometimes simultaneously. With this landmark collection, he continues to illuminate not only how we die, but also how we live.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it.

This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.

Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.

This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.

As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

A collection of original essays by specialists in the field, this book examines the crucial budgetary and financial management problems that face the United States government and makes concrete recommendations on how current processes can be improved. The authors make it clear that although the present federal budgetary and financial management systems are not working, the case is far from hopeless.

Several chapters analyze the flaws in the federal budget-making process that lead to deadlock between the president and Congress and ultimately to higher deficits. To remove the checks and balances system from its present political stalemate, a workable two-stage budgetary process is suggested and bipartisan action at the highest level is strongly urged. Another chapter explains the context in which forecasting is used in federal government budget making and addresses the problem of the failure to predict the yearly budget deficit with reasonable accuracy. Proposals for improving public financial management include centralizing financial management functions, improving debt collection practices, eliminating deficiencies in the application of information technology, and privatizing entities such as the postal service, AMTRAK, and Social Security. Providing clarification of complex issues together with constructive approaches to reform, this book will be of interest to both general readers and scholars, students, and professionals concerned with government, public policy, and financial management.