The Loved Ones: Essays to Bury the Dead by Madison Davis
Winner of the Dzanc Nonfiction Prize, The Loved Ones presents an intimate portrait of family grief, for fans of Maggie Nelson’s Jane: A Murder and Kristin Prevallet’s I, Afterlife
There are so many ways to bury the dead. In an autobiographical series of essays, The Loved Ones explores the deaths of four family members across three generations: an inexplicable double murder, a fatal car accident, a long illness, and a conscripted solider killed in action.
Piece by piece, each essay explores the death a loved one in a collage of vignettes: the loss, the aftermath, the funerals, and the rituals used to say goodbye to the body. As the investigation deepens, Davis lines up other forms of death—capital punishment and murder; medically-assisted suicide and “natural” death from disease; military conscription and “freak accident”—to see what comes to the surface.
The Loved Ones is about the intricate reality of grief, the instability of time and memory in the face of loss, and the feeling of being left behind still living. It asks, what does it mean to bury our loved ones when our only desire is to never let them go?
Publication Date: June 13, 2023
Paperback: 162 pages
ISBN: 9781950539772
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Madison Davis (she/her) is a writer and editor based in Oakland, California. She is the author of Disaster (Timeless, Infinite Light; Nightboat, 2016) and The Loved Ones (Dzanc Books, forthcoming 2023.) Madison’s work can also be found in a few magazines and anthologies and many more files on her computer. Madison received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College in 2009 where she studied poetry and music. In 2011, she moved from New York to Oakland to attend Mills College where she graduated with an MFA in poetry in 2013. She is currently an associate editor at New Harbinger Publications.
