JYBS 8: Donte Collins's "Autopsy"

Purchased: Button Poetry Website
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Recommended By: I was purchasing other books from a project and needed another book to get free shipping. I looked up some of Collins's poems and thought this was the most promising. It turned out that I enjoyed it more than the other two books I ordered, even though those were also great.

Pages Of Poetry: 38

Recommended For: People looking for an in-depth book about grief that's complicated but not completely maudlin. This book doesn't linger at the funeral, doesn't spend all its time near a deathbed or sulking alone in a room. This book follows the griever into the outside world where they have to deal with grief while continuing to be a human trying to exist. If you're intrigued by the idea of a grieving person having a conversation with an Uber Driver on the way to an orgy, only to have the Uber Driver morph into the griever's dead mother, this is the book for you.

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I am fresh from cleaning
Su Miller's house
when I read this. I mean it's been a year and some
months but I am still cleaning that house, and trying not to
picture my friends cleaning
my house while I am in a coma,
nobody sure if I'll live to see which items they chose to salvage
and which to leave
behind. I pick up this book when I am tired
of cleaning. Not Su's house but my own. Death
is not what I am in the mood to read about,
and yet I picked a book called Autopsy from the shelf
because I am an idiot. Grief abounds
but never wallows in this book.​

the visual/formatting changes/from poem to poem/like the landscape/of grief

Prompts

1. Don't Tell Your Uber Driver You're Going To An Orgy. What medium or large size secret have you accidentally told a stranger that made them change their perspective on you? Which person in your life, living or dead, would that secret have provoked a reaction from? Morph the stranger to the family member for part of the poem.

2. Other Things They Would Have Found. Write a list of very specific things of yours that you would imagine someone would find after they discovered your body. No need to give context or how you think the person would react. Just a list of items.  

3. The Orphan Performs An Autopsy. Write an erasure of a well-known patriotic or religious song/prayer.

4. To Keep From Saying Orphan. What word that has been used to describe you do you dislike? What word would rather hear that fills a similar purpose? How would you transition people from the word you don't like to the one you'd prefer?

5. Grief Sestina. We're going to go basic for this: Write a sestina. (Link takes you to Terrance Haye's "You're Do It Yourself Sestina", which I find more helpful and in-depth than most instructions on how to write the form.

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Where You Can Buy This Book: Button Poetry

What You Should Read After:
Daphne Gottleib's Final Girl
Ocean Vuong's Time Is A Mother 
Saeed Jones's How We Fight For Our Lives 
June Jordan's Directed by Desire