Abstract

Obits explores themes of mourning, memorial, and identity. It is a collection of intertextual prose poems in which a speaker attempts and fails to write obituaries for women and others whose obituaries or memorials are missing, or only represented as statistics. The speaker also discusses what she sees as a failure to mourn her aunt, a woman who she knows less about than any of the people she researches; and finally she tries to give an account of herself as a lyric poet in mourning. That is, she asks, what does it mean to be an “I” mourning a “you” when both of us have been ‘othered’ and the act of writing might be an act of othering in itself?
Ultimately the speaker notes a pattern in the failures to mourn certain identities publicly and the political consequences of this failure for a group as small as a family or as large as a nation or as various as an academic discipline. With respect to the collection being intertextual it means that much of the research is directly quoted in the work. The main texts guiding and influencing this collection include but are not limited to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee; Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely; Sina Queyras' MxT; Judith Butler’s Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, and Giving an Account of Oneself; Jill Stauffer’s Ethical Loneliness; and Sigmund Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia. My approach is meant to connect the work of mourning and memorial to elegy and the lyric poet by focussing on where there is an absence or lack of acknowledgement of certain losses and certain bodies.