The Assumption of Death by Anthony David Vernon
Publisher: Alien Buddha Press
Genre: Non-Fiction, Poetry
Rating: 3 Stars
Reviewed by Astilbe

“By turns charming and deeply disturbing, this collection of poems and meditations enthralls and mystifies. This is an engaging and mesmerizing kaleidoscope of ideas about mortality, infinity, and the very essence of being, and it is one of the most captivating hybrid collections I have ever read. I expect that Anthony David Vernon, this exciting new voice in literature, will be thrilling his readers for many years to come.”
– José Sotolongo

Don’t look away from death. Ask it questions instead.

My favorite passages were the ones that used metaphors from nature to explain concepts that could be a little slippery on their own. For example, one poem reminded the audience that “a spider must work with the web that they weave,” and another one made me smile when it said “time to time I come to paths that result in dead ends. But I found that dead ends can lead to clearings.” It was easy for me to imagine those scenes and then play around with them to understand why it’s important to work with the tools you’ve been given or what the advantages are to following a thought to some of its natural conclusions even if it wanders off of the beaten path at first.

The speakers in this collection kept circling around to the idea that death might not happen to everyone. They gave examples from stories about people who either never died or ended their lives in mystical ways. I kept wishing the speakers would go into greater detail about what they meant and how those statements should be woven into some of the other sections that only seemed tangentially related to immortality at first glance.

Some of the most intriguing sections were the ones that teased out the difference between dying and death. There are numerous records of people’s experiences with dying, but death itself cannot be charted in quite the same way. Most books that explore this concept do so from a particular religious perspective, but Mr. Vernon did not do that. His thoughts on the topic could be applied to people from any religion just as easily as they could be applied to people who aren’t interested in that subject at all. Death is a mystery, and the author embraced every aspect of it.

The Assumption of Death had a unique perspective on the topics of death and immortality.