No Grave Can Hold My Body Down

Aaron McCollough

The spectrum of American folk culture, “this stuff colloquial with tongues in dust / by stuff of high prophecy,” informs this book. McCollough offsets elevated language with manic and unheard prayers, folksongs that answer the mandates of the Bible, and a travelogue that speaks in Medieval lyrics. As McCollough leads us across “a land in love with want,” imagined thresholds become concrete landscapes, the things that bind us are cast aside, and we are encouraged to mourn the remains of the world as we exhume our buried wanderlust.

“Aaron McCollough’s No Grave Can Hold My Body Down is a bravura experiment in matching literary modernism with the canon of traditional American musics contained in the subtly syncretistic guitar music of the late John Fahey. McCollough aspires to "walk worthy / between the vespers of history,’ and this book is an elaborate preparation for speaking of the relations between World and Wilderness. I admire McCollough’s strategies for marshalling temporally disparate, dissident voices, and for imagining the experience of the newly risen dead.” —David Grubbs