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For fans of Six Feet Under and Caitlin Doughty’s From Here to Eternity comes a meditation on grief, death, and art by award-winning author Traci Brimhall
The Grief Artist is the nonfiction debut from award-winning poet Traci Brimhall. This essay collection is a meditation about grief, death, art and how we live today in contemporary American culture. Brimhall travels around the country visiting ghost towns, haunted houses, hospice patients and devotees of the paranormal in pursuit of a collective understanding of death, dying, and grief. Brimhall examines the wreaths and tableaux of Victorian mourners, death photography and mourning fashions. She attempts to talk to the dead and visits a museum of haunted objects in the effort to experience something spiritual and uncanny. She makes blankets for hospice patients and interviews supernaturalists all while trying to understand her own grief and asks the questions, how do we grieve communally and is it even possible? Through personal story, historical research and cultural analysis Brimhall makes a case for a collective understanding of death and mourning but her book is also, like Molly McCully Brown says, a “wild catalog of ‘reasons for living,’” Brimhall’s The Grief Artist is a fierce, soulful, and a necessary book for today’s world.
PRAISE FOR THE GRIEF ARTIST
“What happens when one of our nations’ best poets turns her weird and wonderful gaze on death and darkness? In this vibrant and highly entertaining collection, we follow the author through romps with haunted dolls and houses, books bound in human skin, elephant mourning rituals, death dinners, solar eclipses, and dying people’s last words. Enriched with research, studded with arcane facts that prove startlingly relevant, Traci Brimhall’s The Grief Artist is a reflective, wise, and thoroughly original book.”
–Beth Ann Fennelly, author of The Irish Goodbye: Micro-Memoirs
“Where in human life do our visceral and spiritual realms intersect more than in moments of grief? In this fascinating collection, Traci Brimhall conducts gorgeous autopsies on sorrow and loss. She dissects physical objects, body parts, haunted places, violences, and memories. Such work makes Brimhall’s essays common spaces for acts of mourning and moribund curiosity, for meditations on pain as well as complicated pleasure. And thanks to her artful approach to the essay form, these foundational emotions become alchemical powers.”
–Elena Passarello, author of Animals Strike Curious Poses
“This is a mother’s book, a daughter’s, a friend’s, one that affirms, over and over again, a precise and wild catalog of “reasons for living” even as it knows that to live is to wound and be wounded, to lose. In these essays, the world is both hard and deeply beloved, both things bound together. I needed this book; you do too.”
–Molly McCully Brown, author of Places I Have Taken My Body
“While these essays are indeed memento mori –death awareness – they are also memento vivere – life awareness. [...] In the process, she celebrates and elevates our mortality in ways only an original and committed artist can.”
–Sue William Silverman, author of Selected Misdemeanors: Essays at the Mercy of the Reader
PRAISE FOR TRACI BRIMHALL
"With each successive book, there's even more grandness to Brimhall's narrative voice." –The Millions
"I love [Brimhall's] luscious verbal texturing and lyric slipperiness, an assertive voice, a sensuality, a glow. A beautiful book." –Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic
Traci Brimhall is the author of five collections of poetry: Love Prodigal (Copper Canyon, 2024); Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod (Copper Canyon Press, 2020); Saudade (Copper Canyon Press, 2017); Our Lady of the Ruins (W.W. Norton, 2012), selected by Carolyn Forché for the 2011 Barnard Women Poets Prize; and Rookery (Southern Illinois University Press, 2010), selected by Michelle Boisseau for the 2009 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award and finalist for the ForeWord Book of the Year Award. Her most recent publication The Grief Artist (Sarabande, 2026) is her first nonfiction book. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, New England Review, Ploughshares, Orion, Brevity, The New Republic and New York Times Magazine. In 2025, she was Poet-in-Residence at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. In 2023, she received an Artist-in-Residence position through the National Parks Service at Bighorn Canyon. She also serves as the Poet Laureate for the state of Kansas (2023-2026). Brimhall currently resides in Kansas.