All The Rage In The Afterlife This Season by Marcus Cafagña

In this moving and wide-ranging book of poems, Marcus Cafagña works his way through grief–the personal devastation of a beloved’s suicide, and also the grief experienced by others, by those with ”lives lived in tiny kitchens,” and by “the stoop of a life not mine,” as the speaker says, referring to the farmworkers he picked lettuce with one summer.  This is a book written by someone who knows the cost and the gifts of caring, because care he does–for aging parents, for a befriended veteran, a troubled boy, a drunk bartender–all lives he renders with respect and empathy and vivid language.  Cafagña wrestles with the finality and the lingering after effects of painful acts.  But this is, above all, a book of love, love for what is gone and what remains, and the cherishing of others that gives meaning to our troubled world.

–Betsy Sholl

Few poets are so intimate with traumatic experience, and of those even fewer can explore the darkest of themes with such empathy and fearlessness. And of that select company, even fewer attain the greatness that comes from profound emotion, genuine clarity, and moral insight. The greatest poems here portray the poet’s former wife with excruciating, heartbreaking beauty, for she was a human being as alluring and glamorous as she was troubled. Tenderness and generosity are balanced with an understanding of transgressions and their aftermaths. One is reminded of Tennessee Williams, for here too we find a writer who goes to the profoundest of depths and emerges with greater appreciation for what remains. Other poems cover many themes, including family members, veterans, workers in low-wage jobs et al. Readers of Marcus Cafagña’s The Broken World, a National Poetry Series selection, and Roman Fever will appreciate All the Rage in the Afterlife This Season.

—Jeffrey Ethan Lee

All the Rage in the Afterlife This Season resonates with Marcus Cafagña’s masterful sense of compression and compassion that have always been hallmarks of his work. Clear, direct, and honest, these poems resonate with a slow burn that penetrates deeper and deeper with each reading. There is no questioning the authority or motivation for these haunting, powerful poems—they had to be written, and they have to be read.

–Jim Daniels