“Rachel Mallalieu’s collection, The History of Resurrection, is a group of poems about death, and has more life in it than most books I have read about the living. This is to say that Mallalieu’s gifts as a poet are born from her experiences as an emergency medicine doctor and as a mother. So many of these poems come from the poet’s daily interactions with the dying the way most of us are around shoes. Or refrigerators. Or automobiles. I have had the good fortune to read these poems over the course of a few years, and there is a constant amazement that I feel every time I encounter Mallalieu’s work. She could be writing about saving her son from the pool, or a patient in the trauma bay, or delivering a baby—it does not matter, the work always surprises. Her ability to bring us close to all of these living details is masterful because her work is so generous, so full of love and distance and vision and exhaustion. These poems lift us, deliver us, from the bottom of the pool, from six feet under soil, from the sky where her love of nature resides, even as we are heading to these places ourselves. The History of Resurrection says, No No No. Not Yet. There is more time to spend here, with me, rise.“
— Matthew Lippman,
Mesmerizingly Sadly Beautiful