Over at decomP, Spencer Dew discusses the ways in which Becca Jensen’s Among the Dead: Ah! and Afterward Yes! gives us “a completely new use of old myths, a reflection of the fullness with which we, as humans, work through and out of that which came before.”  He goes on:

This is a book composed of references to, engagements with, and citations from a library of sources, “collected” by one of the five voices within the text—“The Collector,” who offers his/her own thoughts on, say, Hillel’s concept of the ubiquity of commentary or Eliot’s notion of individual innovation in relation to tradition and the work of the past. Even the title is an assemblage, from Eliot and from Dickens, but the book unfolds in separate pieces giving voice (and character) to this Collector and a Chorus, a couple—Mrs. G and Mr. G—and a daughter, while also returning to (through appropriation and allusion, critical engagement and an accumulation of echoes—themes such as drowning and exile.

Read the rest of the review here.