Those who are dead can still speak. A witch can be burned, but not silenced. When the abattoir is opened, the dead will rise. Burials is the narrative of those whose voices have been taken away- murdered women, witches, ghosts. It's about speaking one's truth, and using magic to heal or to banish, even from beyond the grave.
With dark, romantic language, vengeful love spells, and the ghosts of old Salem wandering lost among the brittle paper, Burials is a haunting your soul won't soon forget. - Mela Blust, author of Skeleton Parade
Burials is at times fierce and at others keening, but most often it is both at once. Jessica Drake-Thomas writes macabre love poems with the dazzlingly morbid whimsy of a young Morticia Addams driving her 'hearse in seafoam green,' seeking her Gomez in this sad, lonely world. 'I have learned that / love is cheap here, / and something is important / about the idea of // a nice girl,' she tells us. But for the witch-hearted girl, Drake-Thomas gives us love spells that offer a kind of healing for the haunted, for the many ways love so often fails us. - Lindsay Lusby, author of Catechesis, A Postpastoral
Burials is, in fact, a poetic exhumation of bodies interred, in trees, caskets and homes, used and forgotten like the still-living speaker in 'White Silk Lined Coffin.' Its narrator's breaths keep time with our own gasps as we realize she is both entombed and cognizant of the 'cool black beads are slipping between your fingers and the prayers your silent lips form are only for you.' The book is a skeletal secret whispered into the fleshy ears of the living in an eloquent elegy by Drake-Thomas to disposable bodies lifted from the hurt and the dirt with which they have too long been covered. - Kristin Garth, author of Flutter: Southern Gothic Fever Dream and Candy Cigarette: Womanchild Noir
