Thomas Lynch

the effort to give voice to unspeakable things: great love, great heartbreak, great wonder, great pain; Meer

In February of 1970, Thomas Lynch, aged twenty-one, bought a one-way ticket to Ireland. Booking Passage is part travelogue, part cultural study, part memoir and elegy, part guidebook for what Lynch calls 'fellow pilgrims' working their way through their own and the larger histories. Meer

Like all poets, inspired by death, Lynch is, unlike others, also hired to bury the dead or cremate them and to tend to their families in a small Michigan town where he serves as the funeral director. Meer

If life is pilgrimage, Walking Papers are the pages - the notes on the journey, news of the world, letters of introduction and dismissal - found in one's breast-pocket amongst one's effects. Meer