Travis Mossotti writes with humor gravity and humility about subjects grounded in a world of grit where the quiet mortality of working folk is weighed. To Mossotti the love of a bricklayer for his wife is as complex and simple as life itself ask him to put into words what that sinking is that shudder in his chest as he notices the wrinkles gathering at the corners of her mouth. But not a whiff of sentiment enters these poems for Mossotti has little patience for ideas of the noble or for sympathetic portraits of hardused saints. His vision is clear as clear as the memory of how scarecrows in the rearview each of them stuffed into a body they didnt choose resembled your own plight. His poetry embraces unsanctimonious life with all its wonder its levity and clumsiness. About the Dead is an accomplished collection by a writer in control of a wide range of experience and it speaks to the heart of any reader willing to catch his drift and ride it like the billowed end of some cockamamie parachute all the way back to the soft dysfunctional waiting earth.