Always read a book of poems back to front so that the wave rolls backward… Now apply the same method to your whole life.

In Death Work the poet does just that. By rewinding fragments from memory, he bears witness to attachment and its eventual unraveling. This is the point where the sheer weight of a man’s past opens his heart to the mystery. The Japanese have a word for it: jisei, death poems that express a sudden alertness to the fact of this world and the emergence of another. Death Work tracks one man’s descent into clarity, a decompression chamber linking life and death. Thought is a staircase, he writes, then erases it.