A collection of linked essays and poems concerned with the vitality of art and writing in the wake of grief.

At the intersections of poetry, sonic/ visual text, nonfiction, and arts writing, Traceable Relation portrays a writer’s practice within a lineage of aesthetic and practical sensibilities conveyed in the personal effects of her late father and the concrete tasks of communal mourning. In its hybrid forms, Traceable Relation crosses the personal with the conceptual, the formal with the mundane, and the virtuosic with the raw to focus on what is vital and generative in grief. It proposes that “magical thinking” about reversing death heightens transmissions and connections ordinarily obscured by the work of forming structural attachments to a good, meaningful life. In grief’s suspension of stable meanings, a heightened communing with the dead prompts us to perceive the vital nuances of relation. The confluences of past and present and of the living and the dead are quiet, matter-of-fact, and quick, and language sharpens and slows down to track the revelatory in the mundane. In an ongoing practice of “speaking nearby” various works of film, sound installation and pop music, innovative, contemporary writing emerges from diasporic arts of memory and survivance.