Method Acting for the Afterlife

The poems in Heather Sullivan’s Method Acting for the Afterlife bring me to a world of Donny and Marie songs, of hollowed out oak trees, to a world of “unseen demons and/long dead ghosts pushing addiction and/melancholy.” As only a master poet can, Sullivan blurs that line between the seen and the unseen, the living and the dead. As the “toll keeper of existence,” the poet connects us with “everything that I’ve lost forever.” Loss is ever-present, but tempered with humor, with such real imagery – the popular girl’s table, Deadheads, and Limoncello – that my heart is allowed to “break again and again.” I trust Sullivan’s “deliberate, direct” voice – the voice of a “Sabbath child made wise.” Method Acting for the Afterlife is an important book, full of urgency and truth.

— Jennifer Martelli, author of My Tarantella