What would you do if you knew the month of your death? How would you survive that month every year? How would you take advantage of your eleven months of immortality?

Almost a Memoir, a new book of poems by M.C. Rydel, poses this question and others with a collection of lyrical narratives and metaphysical conceits. Performed since 2010 as spoken word poetry in bars, bookstores, theatres, and coffeehouses in cities as diverse as Chicago, New York, Grand Rapids, Flagstaff, and Sedona, this book of poems is almost a narrative, almost personal experience, almost faraway, and almost a memoir, yet it is always about loss & change, work & family, friends & lovers, cats & dogs, moths & bats, and Pablo Neruda & Joseph Brodsky.

This book brings poems from the stage to the page by describing interrupted dreams, heroic and ironic journeys, villanelles, pantoums, ballads, and thirteen poems from the plague year of 2020. Over 100 characters appear in 67 poems. They live in an apophatic universe. Created and then abandoned. They find themselves looking for signs of divinity in a godless world.