by Shawn Levy
First published 2021
Shawn Levy embarks on an ambitious creative project in 2016, committing to write one poem each day inspired by obituaries from The New York Times. The year unfolds as one of unprecedented celebrity deaths, transforming his modest daily practice into a sweeping meditation on loss and legacy. Levy crafts verses for cultural giants like David Bowie, Prince, and Muhammad Ali alongside Nancy Reagan, Arnold Palmer, and Mary Tyler Moore. His subjects range from household names to fascinating unknowns: a Black Miss America, an obsessive weather reporter, the nurse kissed by a sailor on VJ Day, the inventor of the email symbol, and the final astronaut to walk on the moon. Through one hundred poems, Levy captures the full spectrum of human achievement and eccentricity. His verses provoke every emotion from compassion to outrage, nostalgia to unexpected laughter, creating a year-long elegy that doubles as a backstage tour of popular culture.
Genres: biography, death, popular-science, social-issues, poetry, 21st-century
Vibes: emotional-atmospheric, intimate, lyrical, thought-provoking
Tropes: backstage-tour, meditation, sweeping
Period: 2016
150 pages · Kindle Edition · University of Hell Press