How To Bury An Anarchist Is Here!

How to Bury An Anarchist is finally here!

To bury without permission is sometimes illegal. So are many forms of disappearance, secrecy, bodily autonomy, and unauthorized care once institutional authority loses its monopoly over the dead.

After four years in the making, Fíona Vivienne’s How to Bury an Anarchist, Vol. II: Édition Révisée has gone to press and is now available for pre-order from Bacchus Editions.

At once a work of philosophy, history, memoir, and a practical end-of-life field guide, the book follows parallel deathcare across history and into the present: the ways individuals, lovers, chosen families, anarchists, queer communities, mutual-aid societies, and small circles have cared for their dead alongside, beyond, and sometimes in direct conflict with institutional authority…

Moving through hospitals, homes, forests, cemeteries, clandestine graves, family burial grounds, political funerals, archives, and private arrangements between people who have chosen one another, How to Bury an Anarchist asks what happens when intimacy, bodily sovereignty, law, and institutional custody cease to align.

The book moves through home vigils and household deathcare, mutual-aid burial societies, funeral cooperatives, queer burial grounds, forest and conservation burial, clandestine and unmarked graves, political funerals, contested bodies, anti-memorial practices, and deliberate disappearance. Its histories include Joe Hill, Buenaventura Durruti, Sylvia Rivera, ACT UP’s Ashes Action, OWL Farm and the Oregon Women’s Land Trust, Truganini, Safea Jamil Deeb, Collectif Les Morts de la Rue, Tejana mutualistas, queer lovers buried together, and many others.

A substantial portion is devoted to queer and trans deathcare, chosen family, estranged or hostile kin, and the legal mechanisms that determine who is recognized when someone dies. Body custody, healthcare proxies, funeral instructions, wills, hospital advocacy, identity after death, transport, and movement across jurisdictions all lead toward one of the book’s central questions: who acquires authority over a person once that person can no longer answer?

Chosen death is addressed directly through authorship, witness, refusal, bodily sovereignty, clandestinity, entrusted knowledge and letters, intervention and non-intervention, and the limits of what one person may ask another to carry after death.

The practical portions move from documents to bodies themselves: caring for a dead person at home, washing and dressing, shrouds and coffins, carrying a body, digging a grave, natural and forest burial, conservation burial, human composting, aquamation, cremation, body donation, family burial grounds, unmarked burial, and the arrangements through which someone can preserve greater authorship over their own end.

Running beneath these histories and practical mechanisms is an inquiry into possession: who owns a body, a grave, a story, a memory, a secret, or a final wish; what love permits; what should remain private; what the dead may ask of the living; and whether disappearance itself can be allowed to remain complete.

The memoir enters through Fíona’s childhood in Saint-Cirq-Lapopie, her later experiences caring for bodies and accompanying the dying and those who love them, and her work running a forest burial ground.

The finished hardcover runs 336 pages and includes extensive Notes on Sources and a full editorial index. Each copy also includes access to the book’s private companion portal, where the practical work continues beyond the printed volume with materials for creating personal end-of-life plans and resources that can be maintained as laws, procedures, and institutional practices change.

This is also the first hardcover produced entirely by Bacchus Editions, from printing through binding, on our own machines. The first printing is now entering production.

It will be released alongside Wolfi Landstreicher’s Dancing Into Oblivion: Poetic Explorations of Dying, a collection of poetry approaching death through forests, oceans, decay, sorrow, eros, ecstatic laughter, oblivion, and return to earthly flow. The two books arrive at death from very different directions and belong rather beautifully beside one another.

SEE the full table of contents on the product listing page, you don’t want to miss that!

PRE-ORDER: How to Bury an Anarchist is expected to begin shipping September 15, 2026. Pre-orders placed during production will help determine the size of the limited edition first printing.