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In Afterlife, a long poem W. Todd Kaneko searches for ways to contextualize the loss of his father, looking to traditional and personal explanations of death while endeavoring to define these ideas. Nature, cooking, radio static, and a dirty bag in the gutter all remind the poet of his father’s death and take on spiritual importance. Kaneko’s own role as a father is explored alongside childhood memories and visions of possible afterlives. John McKaig created bold, emblematic linoleum cuts pulled from the vivid imagery of the poem.

W. Todd Kaneko is a Kundiman Fellow and Associate Professor at Grand Valley State University. His newest book, This Is How the Bone Sings (Black Lawrence Press 2020), is about Minidoka, the concentration camp built in Idaho for Japanese Americans during World War II. It draws from myth and folk tale to talk about the legacy of trauma across multiple generations in America. He is also the author of The Dead Wrestler Elegies, 2nd Edition (New Michigan Press 2023), a collection of elegies and illustrations that cover themes of loss, love, regret, and redemption, mining the history of professional wrestling to examine complex relationships between fathers and sons. He is co-author with Amorak Huey of Poetry: A Writers’ Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury Academic 2018) and Slash / Slash, winner of the 2020 Diode Editions Chapbook Contest. His work has appeared in Poetry, Blackbird, Best Small Fictions, and many other places.

John McKaig is a professor of drawing, figure drawing and printmaking at Bloomsburg University and Lycoming College in Pennsylvania. He creates pictures that help him explore the idea of escape, sexuality and ideas of mortality and passage after life, and about how to deal with trauma and healing from that trauma. He also explores the idea of “passage” and “journey”, not only to communicate ideas of healing and working through trauma, but also to communicate the idea of growing beyond limitations and definitions of being - without the suggestion of irony or cynicism.

This project was funded by an Arts Project grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

This book was printed from hand-set Caslon type on Flurry cotton paper with a Vandercook Universal III press in an edition of 50 copies (12 casebound, 37 soft cover).

Hard cover: $365
Soft cover: $150
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