“Like the difficult and necessary theological propositions embedded within the works of Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner, Requiem suggests that perhaps, in the end, all we can do is see until we can’t anymore. Carmody’s darkly poignant illustration of this advocates that seeing — despite our fears, limitations, and distractions — may be one of love’s most sincere gestures.”—American Book Review
Requiem by Teresa Carmody is a “folk opera, a lament for the unexamined life,” writes editor and author David Ulin in his Introduction. In this short collection of fiction, a lonely man plainchants for the waitress he once stalked, a sonless father serenades a fatherless son, and a bereft family gathers to bury a parent, providing an aching chorus of what is left. Carmody uses Biblical language to pierce the callous and bruised souls of these lost, and sometimes found, small-town Michiganders. In her raw spare stories, novelist, essayist, and poet Carol Muske-Dukes writes that Carmody creates in her raw, spare stories, “a voice out of the backyard burning bush, a Midwest scriptural mist: frank, fierce and fidgety, and most emphatically her own.”
This title is released as an open access second edition as part of punctum’s Special Collections project.
Teresa Carmody (she/they) writes fiction, creative nonfiction, inter-arts collaborations, and hybrid forms. Their books include Maison Femme: a fiction (Bon Aire Projects, 2015), The Reconception of Marie (Spuyten Duyvil, 2020), and A Healthy Interest in the Lives of Others (Autofocus Books, 2025). Their writing was selected for the &NOW Awards: The Best Innovative Writing (2009) and by Entropy for its Best Online Articles and Essays list of 2019. The Reconception of Marie was also a finalist for the 2020 Big Other Fiction Award and a Reader’s Choice Award. Lucy Ives selected their story “Work Friends, or the Elements of Fiction Make a Story GoGo” as Fugue’s 2024 Prose Contest Runner-Up.
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