death poems, by Andy Mallory

Poetry, chapbook, 32 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

death poems is a meditation on fatality, loss, and the passage of time, consisting of twenty-eight couplets composed in homage to the timeless tradition from which the collection derives its name. By rendering an ancient pathos in modern poetic form, death poems serves as a study in quietude and a reminder of the inextricable connection between death and life, the old and the new.

Matsuo Bashō (1644-1694) famously claimed that any one of his poems could be his death poem, a sentiment congruent with the belief that all life is lived in anticipation of mortality. In the spirit of this sentiment, death poems embraces the paradoxical concomitance of death’s brutal facticity with the transcendent human need to beautify it in every moment.

Andy Mallory is a bartender, musician, and philosophy instructor. He is the author of the chapbooks Schopenhauer’s Dog (Bottlecap Press, 2024) and Four Seasons of Ghosts (Alien Buddha Press, 2023). His fiction has appeared in shoegaze literary, Overgrowth Press Magazine, jagged edge, The Dread Literary Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Maine with his partner and her two parrots. He can be found on Twitter and Instagram (@witheringvessel).