“This text is revolutionary; it presents another way, a new way of making poetry matter.”
- Juan Felipe Herrera, Los Angeles Review of Books
“Anyone interested in the social sciences could stand to benefit from reading this brief, yet insightful, book as Renato’s poetry shows an innovative way of expressing what is often missing from traditional ethnographies. Finally, the avid reader of poetry find great value in how Rosaldo maximises the emotional impact of the situation with his laconic verse.” - Kyle W. West, Centre for Medical Humanities
"I was deeply moved by this collection. Renato Rosaldo has ventured into new territory, and done so with admirable grace and courage." - Sandra Cisneros, author of Caramelo, Have You Seen Marie?, and The House on Mango Street
"In this extraordinary myth cycle, Renato Rosaldo has transformed the story of a death into a multidimensional event made of culturally diverse voices. The poems follow each other, building a tale. Read them aloud. The alchemy of ethnography, narrative, and poetry reassembles an ancient grammar of magic and music. I was swept into an unexpected open space, where telling matters. Anthropologists and poets alike will be inspired and moved." - Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, coeditor of Words in Motion: Toward a Global Lexicon
"Reading these beautiful poems, I felt a kindred artistic spirit. Renato Rosaldo seamlessly inhabits the perspectives of different people, taking us inside his own disorienting grief and shock on the day of his wife Shelly's death, as well as the reactions of others affected by her tragic accident. Just as his feelings reverberated with those of others on that day, these poems resonate with one another. They continue to resonate long after you've closed the book." - Ann Deavere Smith, actress, writer, and educator
"Renato Rosaldo's The Day of Shelly’s Death skillfully and gracefully embraces poetry and prose as 'antropoesía.' The collection transports us to a landscape of convergences, a place of life and death matters where an emotional thread connects and binds the past, present, and future, without the hip lingo of avoidance. The Day of Shelly’s Death becomes an inventive, lived trope for our time—not afraid of the human dimension." - Yusef Komunyakaa, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems
"A sophisticated meditation on memory. It’s a meditation that takes for granted the potential of alternative modes of inquiry to investigate the past (modes that square, I should note, with his ethnographic research). . . . Rosaldo laboriously retraces the ground of his research. The same characters we meet in his academic publications reappear, as he skillfully interweaves the narratives of his subjects—mostly Ilongot peoples, mediated more soberly in his scholarly texts—with the sudden shock of grief. Violence hovers in his words." - Luke A. Fidler, Economy
"[A] wise, beautiful, and moving testimony to the power of Rosaldo’s distinctive form of poetic inquiry. It opens salient dimensions of the emotional, social, and political worlds that the family occupied during their two months in the Philippines in 1981. And it provokes deep meditation about life, death, and our connections to one another." - Jane Monnig Atkinson, Anthropological Quarterly
“This is genre-bending in the most meaningful sense of the term, not because the author wanted to explore his subject matter in a variety of genres but because he has expertise in a number of fields, and that expertise very naturally rose to the surface here. Dealing with loss is very much about memory. The Day of Shelly’s Death remembers. And it re-members, that is, it reconnects the pieces of broken, fragmented experience.” - Margaret Randall, World Literature Today
“The Day of Shelly’s Death heralds a brave new way to do anthropology, beautiful in its conversational delivery through poetry and complex in its commentary on culture, emotion and personhood.” - Brigitte Lewis, The Australian Journal of Anthropology
