You're seated next to the ferryman on the River Styx and ask him how he's doing. He simply lifts a boney finger toward the sign at the bow the vessel that reads "Headed to Paradise."A Short Journey into the Land of the Dead is an ecstatic performance in the form of poetry that walks its reader through the afterlife by way of haunting comedy and electricity, bringing us at times to the brink of the author's own personal insanity. This work toes the line between self-soothing and self-destruction, threatening to fall apart or fix itself in every line. Nick Bonarski guides us through a dark forest of mystery, oddity and travesty, hope, fear, and battlegrounds that look an awful lot like theater, however, tap into something a little more human than the stage let's on. A true work of shadows, each time the light swings through this unlit underworld, a new shape comes to life, to dance, to sing, or to re-experience it's former self from a time it once lived on the other side of death.