REQUIEM is a “folk opera, a lament for the unexamined life,” writes editor and author David L. Ulin in his Introduction, “marked throughout by its own quiet tone of authority, which works to peel back the surface of what we imagine and examine what is going on underneath.”

Drawing out the elliptical plain talk of those who would refer to themselves as simple, using Biblical language to pierce the callous and bruised souls of these lost, and sometimes found, people, Carmody creates, says Ulin,” art as observation, a literature constructed of the most minute details, a lens that allows us to see.”