A forensic elegy, Slippage excavates through the ruins of memory to parse each individual from the tragedy that, over time, comes to define him. “From the trees beside the lake by the woods in the mirror / Of a scalpel” Munde calls them up, to lie stark and separate from the extremity of their circumstances. It’s from this pathologist’s perch that we may observe true restoration, a sort of decay-in-reverse, as these poems, pitiless as insects, trace the shapes of those lost.
“Unexpected loss begins the forensic examination of the body in Christopher Munde’s haunting first collection of poetry, Slippage, where the dead and the nearly so are laid out in a glorious, chilling need to follow and to understand on every level. Planes are drawn to water, MRSA invades through obsessively cleansed hands, and victims-to-be can’st help but approach the lethal process through which “one element finds its / Identity deep inside another.”
—Lisa Lewis, author of The Body Double
“In Christopher Munde’s Slippage, we are pulled into a gruesome and beautiful exhumation of mortality. Through séances, communiquÉs with the dead, across the curated corpses in a forensic body farm, the sinews pop as we are bathed in the power of transformation; a corpse that when disturbed bursts forth thousands of rainbow-winged flies, the body’s alteration in memory and air. Read this book, and let yourself, too, be changed forever.”
—Glenn Shaheen, author of Carnivalia
Christopher Munde’s poetry has appeared in Blackbird, The Literary Review, Massachusetts Review, Third Coast, West Branch Wired, and elsewhere. He is a graduate of the University of Houston’s MFA program and a recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize. Presently, he lives in western NY, and teaches at Jamestown Community College. Slippage is his first book.
