A Buyer’s Guide to the Afterlife

With A Buyer’s Guide to the Afterlife, Erica Wright has “invent[ed] a city for loss,” but also recovery. Rooted in the bodily challenges of parenthood and tactile landscapes populated by living and dying animals, this lyric collection dips into metaphysics, playing with the if-then of conditional logic (“If the afterlife stretches / forever”) and delivering ironic pronouncements about narrative expectation (“widows / and strangers reside in every story”). The speaker in these poems has the confidence to say, “I need to know that kind / of faith, that kind of failure again,” yet so few of the poems go to the expected places. Wright has created a world I want to enter.

—Erin Hoover, author of No Spare People

What do we make of the apocalypse that always seems to come at us, but see it settle into the museum of our grief? We bear it because the unimaginable has come once, more than once, because it is the world that has been assigned to us. Erica Wright’s superb third book, A Buyer’s Guide to the Afterlife, crafts a strong response to Milosz’s observation toward the previous century: “there will be no other end of the world.” Her poems come to us with resounding affirmation to find courage in our questions and to stay tethered to this life. What is a body but a catalogue of living? What is science but the quiet rebellion against what is deemed to be known? Grief, joy, motherhood, violence, our national reckonings—Erica Wright’s book points to that unifying nerve that binds us to this planet, asking more of us, in a deepening sense, against our vanishing.

—Ricardo Maldonado, author of The Life Assignment

A Buyer’s Guide to the Afterlife maps the overlapping territories of motherhood and mourning, devotion and doubt, natural history and personal catastrophe, in a world that refuses to hold still. In this stunning collection, Wright’s genius lies in her juxtapositions and tonal swerves: a woman wakes in a coffin and decides to stay, the Navy studies sharks to build better ships, veins surface like submarines. Anchoring the collection’s wide-ranging scope, the “Inventory” poems serve as the collection’s temporal spine, marking the years of miscarriage, pregnancy, and early motherhood. Each catalogs what accrues against erasure. Where does personal grief end and historical grief begin? Where do the body’s animal vulnerabilities meet an era of mass extinction? Wright finds no answer, only the ongoing work of accounting—a ledger that refuses to balance. Yet the poems resist despair, carrying an insistent, even defiant joy, as likely to argue with the divine as to celebrate what remains green and growing. These triumphant and deeply wrought poems insist: we are animals who love. Who grieve. Who plant beans in dangerous heat and call it hope.

—Charlotte Pence, author of Many Small Fires and Code