Over at Zyzzyva‘s blog, Maggie Millner turns her attention to Jessica Bozek’s The Tales:

The crux of The Tales lies in this poethical concept of memorialization—in the question of how to construct an elegy that is somber without being static, referential of the dead without becoming, in Susan Sontag’s words, an “institution-cum-emporium” that traffics in “the marketing of experiences, tastes, and simulacra.” To paraphrase Joan Retallack, an elegy (or monument) becomes the nominal stand-in for the deceased—a signifier that appears only when the names of the dead cease to be predicated by verbs of being. By extension, the truest elegy—the most representative testament to a truncated life—is one that is perishable, that will “grey and fray as most of the dead did not have a chance to.”

Read Millner’s full review at Zyzzyva.