Carrying the Bones by Eileen Elizabeth

Carrying the Bones braids memoir, cultural criticism, and poetics to ask how we might mourn meaningfully in an era of environmental crisis and pandemic loss. Moving between the personal and the planetary, the book traverses landscapes from Appalachian forests and West Coast cemeteries to Arctic tundra and Sámi song traditions, drawing on ancient Greek lyric, Indigenous cosmologies, and contemporary ecological thought. Each of the four sections serves as a ritual space: an act of carrying the dead, tending their memories, and imagining futures beyond despair. Through fieldwork, historical research, and intimate narrative from a queer perspective, author Eileen Elizabeth explores how grief can be more than private sorrow—it can become an artistic, communal, and ecological practice.

By providing narrative and ritual prompts at a moment when traditional funerary customs have been disrupted and many people lack scripts for grief, Carrying the Bones empowers individuals—especially those who identify as secular or spiritually unaffiliated—to craft new rites of remembrance. It offers a luminous contribution to ongoing conversations about how art, language, and ritual can help us face mortality and care for a dying world.