Thomas Lynch: Poet & Undertaker

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"There is nothing like the sight of a dead human body to assist the living in separating the good days from the bad ones. Of this truth I have some experience," writes Thomas Lynch in Bodies in Motion and at Rest: On Metaphor and Mortality. Lynch is the author of three collections of poems and three books of essays. A book of stories, Apparition & Late Fictions, and a new collection of poems, Walking Papers, will be published in 2010. His work has also appeared in The Atlantic, Granta, the New York Times, the Times of London, The New Yorker, and Paris Review. Lynch lives in Milford, Michigan, where he has been the funeral director since 1974, and in Moveen, County Clare, Ireland, where he keeps an ancestral cottage. In this program, Lynch reads from his work and reflects on his unusual perspective as poet and undertaker, and what this duality brings to his writing. After a reading, Lynch will be interviewed by the president of the Poetry Foundation, John Barr.

This program is presented in partnership with The Poetry Foundation.

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Entertainment

Tags:

• Poetry
• death
• human body
• mortician
• funeral director
• County Clare
• Ireland
• Michigan
• poet
• undertaker
• Poetry Foundation
• Six Feet Under
• Chicago Humanities Festival