This is How You Disappear

This is How You Disappear celebrates the dead and missing friends who were the formative and enduring influences on Reed’s life as a poet. Using the elegy to imaginatively recreate the often extraordinary individual characteristics of his subjects, Reed’s personal book of the dead is one that burns with his customary dynamic for dazzling imagery, glows with compassion for the suffering, and sparkles with a visual retrieval of detail so acute it hurts. With the title taken from the first line of a Scott Walker song, ‘Rawhide’, This is How You Disappear is elegiac poetry at its most brilliant.