I Read Max Porter’s ‘Grief Is the Thing With Feathers’.

I picked this one up because of its visually stark and interesting cover. It was brief, its format inside was poetic and and seemed like it had potential to be laced with beauty. Some of the blurbs talked about it being Remarkable, Beyond Beauty, Grief But Inbued With Magic and other such hyperbole. This felt like something I was ready for, something with a punch and a rending that I could bear. I’ve been in a funk and I’d wanted to be hit with a knockout blow.

This one was a bit more ‘silly’ and cheeky, kind of like that film Tully from a few years ago where a family Needs Something and the Something introduces itself and it kind of brings them together in a Neat(!) and Fun(!) kind of way. In this book’s case, The Crow (who represents grief and the passage through it) feels like of like Ted and Family Guy’s Brian both accomplishing pathways of closure and strife, but also, at some point, mocking the Dad for sleeping with a new woman by doing thrusting and moaning sounds.

Ok.

I will admit openly that I have not endured grief and I’m not sure what the heart, what the body, what the mind needs in these times. I don’t know what will fill you back up, I don’t know what will make the road ahead more easily traversed. Maybe a silly little bird who talks in Rumpelstiltskin hob-knob sing-song is exactly what a family needs. But from an external perspective, trying to relate to sadness, trying to use this text as a totem through my own pressurized vacuum of Hurt, it all felt a bit like reading Silly Jiminy Cricket As Performed and Written By Thom Yorke.

I don’t recommend this book. There is a piece of art that I do recommend, though, but it’s not a book. It’s an album/song by a band/artist named Mount Eerie called A Crow Looked At Me. It is a bleak and near-perfect record that tore me in pieces and allowed me to put it back together after the record was done. It examined the small and the large of grief and Losing Someone and is all together not a good time, but it accomplished for me what I hoped this book would.