Literary Nonfiction. "This beautiful prose collection strikes very deep notes. Rachel Hadas, known for her formal dexterity and intelligence, demonstrates here a remarkable fluency in moving from the disarmingly personal to the perceptively literary-critical, from the daily round to the ancient world, and from heartbreak to wonderment. Poetry is alive in her, as is a calm, humane attentiveness to the normalcy of grief and the possibilities of consolation."—Phillip Lopate "As I read TALKING TO THE DEAD, I felt I was engaged in a wide- ranging, personal, pleasurable, and erudite conversation with Rachel Hadas herself. She is deft, as few others are, at integrating her deep scholarship with a compassionate understanding of the human and the humorous everyday, and as she turns her sharp eye, clear intelligence, and ready wit on subjects as various as Dante and dreams, Homer and Plath, snakes and centaurs, illness and invisibility, she never fails to surprise, stimulate, and satisfy both heart and mind."—Lydia Davis