REVIEW

All the Dead We Have Yet to Bury by Mario Aliberto III is a masterful collection of ten flash fictions about grief and the impossible task of moving forward after the death of a close loved one.

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Aliberto’s characters are a diverse group. They are brash, reserved, funny, serious. Teens, grown sons, widows. They are all, however, haunted. Some literally, some metaphorically. They have lost spouses, siblings, parents. They cope in equally diverse ways—by shooting at a hurricane, yelling obscenities at work, drunkenly playing Frogger across a busy street, or obsessing over Law & Order reruns. Their grief is fresh or decades old. Yet none of them know how to move on.

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The forms of Aliberto’s stories are as diverse as his characters. Single-sentence stories and traditionally paragraphed ones. The first story in the collection opens hermit-crab style with a want ad—a widow seeking a ghost to remind her of her departed Tully, who used to urinate too loudly and snore through ballgames. One of the more arresting stories of the collection, “All Apologies,” embeds found poetry amid its prose, and the story “Impact” skillfully plays with the line between prose and prose poem as a wife considers alternate timelines for the plane crash that took her husband.

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This sheer amount of difference hammers home Aliberto’s message: none of us know how to grieve. We’re all muddling through. The collection riffs on this truth. Chews on it. By the final story, “Goodbye, Tampa,” when teenage Cammy considers that “life [is] little more than a succession of farewells,” the pronouncement feels heartbreakingly inevitable. We’ve been feeling it this whole time. Finally, someone’s put the thought into words.

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Beyond its tight theming, what makes this collection sing is Aliberto’s storytelling. His stories feel so immediate. Almost like you and he are hanging out, and he’s saying, “I gotta tell you about this lady who put an ad out for a ghost . . . .” His ease and humor allow us to drop into this heady material. A book about death isn’t something to be approached lightly, but in Aliberto’s hands, the reader emerges grounded, entertained, and feeling less alone. Because we’re in this together, Aliberto assures us, this cruel fate that makes us all leave each other eventually.

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Book Details

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All the Dead We Have Yet to Bury can be purchased here.

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Published by Chestnut Review Chapbooks, this book comprises 37 pages, including acknowledgments. The volume measures 6" x 9" and features pitch-perfect cover art by Kylie Aliberto.

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