Summary: In “Past Tense: Portraits and Poems of Suicides,” twenty-three lives — spanning more than a century, some world-famous and some known only to the few who loved them — are given voice through poems shaped to match their subjects. Virginia Woolf, Kate Spade, Aaron Swartz, Jim Morrison, and Diane Arbus appear alongside figures far less documented, each explored not to explain their deaths but to sit inside the moment closest to the unknowable.
Essence: This book raises the dead — and lets them finally name what undid them.
Tagline: An obituary ends the story. These poems refuse to.
