Paper Caskets is a collection of prose poetry that reveals and exposes the dead. The manuscript, made up for four parts, proposes a poetics of the box - as coffin, as prose parameters of the page, as photograph, as state of mind and body in the face of death. The poetry partially draws inspiration from postmortem photographs of children, recounting how the bodies come to have their pictures taken and how those who work and mourn affect the process. The poetry also locates death in the everyday: in the garden, on the beach, at a dance recital. Between artistry and absurdity, Paper Caskets looks beyond grief to see the dead as dynamic places where memory and body collide, where flesh rots and fluid seeps and we de/compose poetry