To Grieve Is to Carry Another Time

"To Grieve Is To Carry Another Time is a stunning and wholly unique exploration of grief as an entire, ever-changing universe that lives within a person and every place they touch. Matthew Salesses has done incredible work to ask readers to look closely at all of the moving parts that exist not just in loss, but also in its aftermath: guilt, anxiety, frustration, longing. All of the parts that make up the machine. This is a special, impressively honest and vulnerable book."—Hanif Abdurraqib, author of There’s Always This Year and A Little Devil in America

“An exquisite jewel of a book that held me captive from start to finish. Salesses's prose gleams on every page—at turns philosophical and wrenching, always full of wisdom, intelligence, and heart.”—Melissa Febos, national bestselling author of Girlhood and The Dry Season

"To Grieve Is To Carry Another Time is an examination of grief in its profound complexity, centering Salesses’s deeply felt lived experience within an expansive constellation of scholars, novelists, poets, sociologists, memoirists, anthropologists, neurophysiologists, middle-grade and picture book authors, literary and cultural critics, and philosophers. Its structure is perfection and his scene work precise. Grief is born of pain, and we feel it in these pages (there is a single sentence so devastating I felt my body break). Grief is also, Salesses argues, desire. And love. As someone wrestling with my own seemingly impossible grief—and hell, aren’t we all?—Salesses is a north star, a challenge to be better, and permission to save my own life, and we need such a balm and such a voice."—Megan Stielstra, author of The Wrong Way to Save Your Life