Teaching Brevity: Traci Brimhall’s “Post-Mortem”

Illustration from Wikipedia

By Amie Souza Reilly

There’s a toy called a Jacob’s ladder made from flat wooden blocks held together with ribbons. You hold the top block at its edges, letting the squares hang down and then, with a turn of the wrist, the blocks seem to flip, to tumble down the line.

Traci Brimhall’s essay “Post-mortem” opens with a paragraph about death in the arctic, the slowness of decay in the cold. Next, a paragraph explaining the death of a friend, missing then murdere...