A01=Chad Davidson
Author_Chad Davidson
Bob Ross
Category=DNC
Category=DNL
Category=DNT
classical art
Edward Hopper
eq_anthologies-novellas-short-stories
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_fiction
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
essay collections
Inferno
Kiss side projects
literary nonfiction
lockdown year
loss
memory
mixtape
mourning
nepenthe
nostalgia
Odyssey
personal grieving
running
solo albums
Product details
- ISBN 9780807181263
- Weight: 272g
- Dimensions: 140 x 216mm
- Publication Date: 31 Jan 2024
- Publisher: Louisiana State University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Could the shlock-rock '70s band Kiss in any way affect the outcome of a death-dealing twenty-first-century virus? Is Bob Ross—that permed, inimitable painter of Edenic nostalgia on PBS—actually an emissary from the land of personal loss? Might the work of Edward Hopper reflect facets of a global plague? What is the grammar, finally, of grief, of isolation?
The essays in Chad Davidson's Bring Out Your Dead: Elegies from the Plague Year mainly concern the loss of the author's father directly before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the ways in which the pandemic itself provided a strangely ideal backdrop to grieving. Refracted through the kaleidoscopic, yet strangely stagnant, isolation period in the first year of COVID, his father's death—another plague visited on the author—found its way into all his waking hours, coloring whatever he tried to write, particularly when he tried not to let it. Friends both lost and nearly so, the burning of Notre Dame in Paris, even the seemingly inconsequential discovery of a rash of chew toys in the yard: these events assumed an unmistakable gravity, considered in the midst of a pandemic and the ruins of personal grief.
Bring Out Your Dead adds Davidson's father to the growing list of loved ones lost in—and, in this case, right before—the pandemic. It's a personal memorial, given over to a father's memory and the grief endured while living through dueling plagues (one viral, the other psychological). In the end, the book becomes more about the ways we eulogize, how we remember those who are gone, why their memories persist, and what summons them back into our thoughts, our language, and our lives.
The essays in Chad Davidson's Bring Out Your Dead: Elegies from the Plague Year mainly concern the loss of the author's father directly before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the ways in which the pandemic itself provided a strangely ideal backdrop to grieving. Refracted through the kaleidoscopic, yet strangely stagnant, isolation period in the first year of COVID, his father's death—another plague visited on the author—found its way into all his waking hours, coloring whatever he tried to write, particularly when he tried not to let it. Friends both lost and nearly so, the burning of Notre Dame in Paris, even the seemingly inconsequential discovery of a rash of chew toys in the yard: these events assumed an unmistakable gravity, considered in the midst of a pandemic and the ruins of personal grief.
Bring Out Your Dead adds Davidson's father to the growing list of loved ones lost in—and, in this case, right before—the pandemic. It's a personal memorial, given over to a father's memory and the grief endured while living through dueling plagues (one viral, the other psychological). In the end, the book becomes more about the ways we eulogize, how we remember those who are gone, why their memories persist, and what summons them back into our thoughts, our language, and our lives.
Chad Davidson is the author of the essay collection Terra Cognita: Dispatches from an Over-Traveled Italy and four volumes of poetry, most recently Unearth. He lives in Carrollton, Georgia.
