IN THE POEM “POST,” from her posthumously published collection, The Cipher, Molly Brodak writes:
The dead come back
not for you,
for themselves,
to hear their own stories
for the first time.
I couldn’t shake the feeling while reading Molly—writer Blake Butler’s anguished chronicle of the decade he and Brodak, his late wife, spent together—that she was listening in, and that she and I had surfaced from some underwater place to bear witness to Butler’s act of witnessing, to choke down his story of her life and death, and of their entanglement, with all its mercilessly serrated edges. Molly, unsurprisingly, is a resurrection animated by loss and its affects, from shock to grief, anger to guilt. As a text, it is promiscuously digressive, polyvocal, and sort of messy, calling on those who encounter it to ask: How should a grief memoir be? This is a formal and familiar query—can language suffice as a container for trauma—but it is also, urgently, a relational one: How should readers and critics receive the suffering of others, and what does a post-traumatic account demand of its audience? In literature, as in life, fear often permeates these points of contact. “I’m sick,” the speaker of “Post” admits after surveying her world, “looking has made me / sick.” We seek distance and summon disavowals, disquieted by the threat of infection.
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