Postlude to the End of

Praise for J. Parker Marvin

“The devotional care of holding space for someone’s life—the ‘quantum relationship’ of one’s mother—as they actively die at home is a complex interaction of emotions, familial relations, cultural ritual, and the pervading atmosphere of the environment that supports the continuum of life-death. J. Parker Marvin openly shares with the reader the primacy of the encounter with his mother’s unfolding passing. This poignant series of poems is a daybook chronicling a soul-searing fourteen-day meditation on impermanence and transformation and the ‘gathering time contracts’ of sustained grieving that continues in time and space. Sensitively equipoised language conveys the arrival of silence and stillness. This gorgeously wrought elegy meshes ‘tangents ambivalenting’ in sanctified and intimate attention.”
-Brenda Iijima, author of Presence (University of Georgia Press) and Bionic Communality (Roof Books)

“When calamity breaks us, destroying perceptions—our held beliefs or, even, faith—we ‘frantic amateurs over a dying’ tend to try to write it out along standardized lines, believing, perhaps, they can force the disaster into the fold of the acceptable past’s grammar. Impossible. Postlude to the End of, J. Parker Marvin’s debut poetry collection, is an intimate, startling, and disturbing record of the poet’s experience of their mother’s death—rendered in language like no other. ‘Underwritten by’ the ‘and’ of relationships, the poet moves into the zone of death and the future that is loss—a space demarcated by ambient wordscapes of information overload (the heard, remembered, and received of medical terminology and the biblical), repeated utterances, and halting pauses. From this plane, Marvin weaves this focused, intensive discourse on the subjective experience the deaths of closely-held others have upon our bodies and minds. In this book, you will see how memories can unconsciously attack our concentrations; and know how the deads’ faces and voices fade from our remembering grip. You will wonder— frustrated, confused, and scared—’what/is the value of words’ as you are ‘cleav[ed] from images.’ Those of us who have experienced such loss will find much of this familiar to memory, all the while having been incapable ourselves to put it on our own pages. Those of you who have not experienced this loss—with caution and care—will know what to anticipate, to a degree, from this—such a raw and emotional poetry. Regardless—we all need this book.”
-Thom Eichelberger-Young, author of BESPOKE (St. Andrews Press) and ANTIKYTHERA (Antiphony Press)