In her stark yet tender essay collection, The Loved Ones, poet Madison Davis (Disaster) grapples with the deaths of family members from murder, illness, accident, and war. The collection's four long autobiographical essays chronicle the several major blows that Davis's Washington State clan suffered within a decade. Opener "Kill Me Good" intercuts the murder of her 20-year-old cousin, Tanner, at her aunt's house in February 2008 with other grisly episodes from her family history, including an ancestor's suicide and her grandfather's witnessing of the last public hanging (of a Black man) in Kentucky in 1936. "My blood fiction," Davis--who now lives in Oakland, Calif.--calls this legacy of violence.
Blending excerpts from his journals and incidents from a hospital stay, "Mercy" tells the story of her late father's multiple sclerosis battle. "Inheritance" toggles between her 23-year-old brother Solomon's death in a 2012 car accident and her great-uncle's death in World War II. Davis makes a Freedom of Information request and travels to Europe to learn more about the latter, always cognizant of her and her grandmother's parallel losses of an only brother.
"Carrion," which closes this subtle and elegiac work, considers the aftermath of all four deaths: mental illness, openness to ghosts, and a search for healers--or a double-life sentence for Tanner's killer. "People keep getting scooped out of our family one way or another. I don't know why it matters except to say that it should add up to something. Shouldn't it?" Davis's earnest search for meaning will resonate widely, especially with the bereaved. --Rebecca Foster, freelance reviewer, proofreader and blogger at Bookish Beck