Once upon the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Dutch elites commissioned master artists to paint lavish still lives of their riches, arranged nicely with human skulls, snuffed candles, rotting fruit, and other memento mori symbols. All this to recall that earthly life is ashen and senseless compared to the afterlife, so we’d best not get too precious about these fleeting, pretty things (preserved for all posterity in gilded frames above the banquet table.) The paintings were opulent, grim, Baroque, high-brow campy, and goth as Hell. So pious, it burns….
 
Vanitas & Other Sticky Kitsch rummages through the curio cupboards of haunted memory and macabre history. Let’s throw ourselves doomed searches for meaning in artifice, hedonism, and play-pretend psychometry. Let’s bum around with ghosts and call it research. Let’s find saucier ways to parade our confusion as we trace how we got here. Let’s follow the Dead Man’s Compass, locate ourselves within history, and chart surreal, new maps to follow. 
 
Let’s watch a rotting thing turn beautiful.
 
The poetry and illustrations in this collection meditate on decadence and vanity, in every possible sense of the word, but especially as it recalls the splendor, urgency, sweet futility, and brevity of life. Here lies decorative grief for the autumn of an ailing society, and for you who have Seen Things.
 
This EPUB download is fixed format. You can still zoom in and out, but the formatting on the pages is static. This collection is heavily illustrated and the paragraph and page breaks are meaningful, so I strongly recommend the fixed format EPUB. The image quality is larger and better here. Reflowable ebook downloads are available however, on Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DLLNRDSM
 
The paperback is available here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DLTZ1KJ7