“And I should make it clear that the book is, like Miller’s movies, intensely lively despite the centrality of death; there’s a vividness and energy to these prose poems that complements and counterbalances their sadness. Even in the brutally, bodily real middle section, with its details of decline and mundane hospital horrors, there are flashes of fantasy, moments of clarity, startling sequences of estrangement and wonder. Again that doubling: grounded, physical, serious; but partaking of the numinous, magical, silly possibilities of science fiction and fantasy. I don’t know if you’ve experienced the way that hypervigilance and the surreal can crash into each other in intense moments and our recollections of them, but there’s an amazing sequence here, a cab ride to the hospital, that captures how reality warps right when it seems you’re the closest to it you’ve ever been... The way Hagood uses science fiction to talk about, to think about, so big and outlandish and impossible a topic as death is genuinely moving. Reading Death and Other Speculative Fictions changed how I look at some of the books on my shelves, some of the deaths in my life: a new feeling for what some of these stories are, what they can do, what they cannot. Highly recommended.”
