inscriptions for headstones
“This is the loudest, liveliest cemetery you will ever encounter, teeming with the voices of those who refuse to rest in peace. If you are looking for aliens, basketball phenoms, Lakota Indians, GIFs, ladybug infestations, mescaline, puppets, God, the Orion nebula, CGI, guys named Gary, Barthelemian fathers and sons, or yellowjackets carrying venom extracted from dead snake heads, you will find them all here. One part prayer book, one part party game, Inscriptions for Headstones is exquisitely, exactingly appreciative of life’s most potent, fleeting, and confounding moments. To quote one headstone contained herein, it is as though Vollmer has ‘dialed into a secret radio station or [is] listening with a stethoscope to the heart of universe.’”
– Wendy Brenner, author of PHONE CALLS FROM THE DEAD
“Matthew Vollmer is a cheater. Not the kind of cheater who breaks rules, mind you, but that’s almost worse. He’s the kind of cheater that twists every rule to his own devious advantage and smiles an artful smile as his dumbstruck peers watch on in seething jealousy. He’s not the easily dismissed kind of cheater, no — he’s terribly smart, and generally a compassionate human being, besides. He’s the kind of cheater you want to have around in literature. In fact, he’s a little like Tom Sawyer.
“Inscriptions for Headstones is a remarkable deception. The project of the book is astoundingly audacious; the volume is comprised of thirty short essays that unfold over a single sentence. All of these essays are epitaphs. Of course none of these epitaphs would fit on the face of a headstone (unless the were chiseled in really tiny letters), but what they accomplish with such a constraint is truly remarkable.”
–Paul Fauteux in The Lit Hub
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