A Review of Katherine McCord’s Run Scream Unbury Save
Katherine McCord’s book Run Scream Unbury Save, winner of the 2016 Autumn House nonfiction prize chosen by Michael Martone, is a whetstone of a fragmented and poetic memoir in bursts and paragraphs. You will emerge from each page emboldened to capture the exact this-ness of your day as a shadowbox-diorama with that exact plastic dinosaur...
A Review of Jericho Parms’ Lost Wax
In “To Capture the Castle,” an essay in her collection Lost Wax, Jericho Parms recounts an arduous climb to the summit of Croagh Patrick. The essay weaves its way upward, over the landscape of Ireland, tracing the outlines of other individuals on the pilgrimage, and winds its way through memory. “I can understand pilgrimage as...
A Review of Kristen Radtke’s Imagine Wanting Only This
Kristen Radtke’s graphic memoir Imagine Wanting Only This is a book about abandonment. Through Radtke’s beautiful and bruising images, we consider the ways we leave places and people, and the ways they leave us. We feel these departures deeply because of Radtke’s painstaking drawings, which allow us to experience the story for ourselves with an...
A Review of B.J. Hollars’ Flock Together: A Love Affair with Extinct Birds
A “spark bird,” I learned from B.J. Hollars’ Flock Together: A Love Affair With Extinct Birds, is the bird that gets one interested in birding. Presumably, it takes you beyond casual observation and into impassioned enthusiasm. In Hollars’ case, his spark bird leads him into an exploration of extinct birds, which leads him to investigating the...
A Review of Phillip Lopate’s A Mother’s Tale
In the fall of 2005, my thirteen-year-old son tried to hang himself by using a leather belt that held up the pants of his Easter suit. By some miracle, the belt ripped in two, throwing my son to the floor, leaving him breathless but alive. Since then, I’ve come to see death and life separated...
A Review of Sonya Huber’s Pain Woman Takes Your Keys and Other Essays from a Nervous System
This is a book about pain. Chronic, searing, never-ending pain—a pain that’s shaped Sonya Huber’s life for years. It’s also a book about the language of pain, the discourse of pain, and her gradual movement toward being able to talk and write about her experience with this mysterious thing that dominates her life. As someone...
Review of Lisa Knopp’s Bread: A Memoir of Hunger
Bread: A Memoir of Hunger, with its yeast-bubble cover art, screams anorexia memoir from all surfaces. In fact, when I found myself carrying it around one evening with a to-go slice of chocolate cake in my other hand, I realized I might have looked a bit troubled, or, oppositely, totally recovered and beyond reproach. This...
A Review of Ariel Leve’s An Abbreviated Life: A Memoir
When my brother and I acted out as children, my mother threatened us with exile. If we fought, she said she’d drop us on our father’s doorstep. And if we were really bad, say, if we refused to eat our cheeseburger-flavored Hamburger Helper, she’d leave us with our maternal grandmother, Barb. She said she loved...
A Review of J. Drew Lanham’s The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature
“There are still priceless places,” J. Drew Lanham says, “where nature hangs on by tooth, talon, and tendril.” And there remain rare breeds of humans who fall in love with a land darkened by the blood and sweat of ancestors purchased to work it. Google a list of nature writers and a band of such...
A Review of Mary Cappello’s Life Breaks In: A Mood Almanack
All my life I have been a browser of dictionaries, a Sunday-afternoon flipper of phone books, a belly-on-the-carpet peruser of atlases and anthologies. I’ve been a geek for information since I picked up my first children’s illustrated encyclopedia. But I also love a good story, which is probably why I read essays. Who can resist...
A Review of Joel Peckham’s Body Memory
“Without the emotional connection to pain, pain is still experienced, but not as pain.” — Joel Peckham, Body Memory How do I explain what Body Memory, Joel Peckham’s most recent collection of essays, is doing? Do I say that this book is an exploration of the ramifications of physical pain? Do I say that this...
A Review of Barbara Hurd’s Listening to the Savage: River Notes and Half-Heard Melodies
About half-way through Barbara Hurd’s latest essay collection, Listening to the Savage: River Notes and Half-Heard Melodies, I find myself splayed across a granite boulder in the middle of the small river that runs through my backyard in rural Vermont. Obviously, I am listening for crayfish. An avid river watcher, I confess that until reading...
A Review of Heidi Julavits’s The Folded Clock: A Diary
I came across some of my deceased father’s clothing while getting ready to move last month: a Hawaiian shirt I bought him when I visited Oahu and some old military fatigues. When I was going through his house after he died, about a decade ago, these clothes seemed the perfect objects to hold onto. I...
A Review of Luke Dittrich’s Patient H.M.
Luke Dittrich has a stark inheritance. His grandfather, William Scoville, was the second most accomplished lobotomist in the history of medicine. This prominent neurosurgeon at Hartford Hospital had a career that ran parallel with one of the most scientifically fruitful and morally dubious periods of our medical advancement: the early and mid-century era of American...
A Review of Michelle Tea’s Black Wave
Over the past month I’ve been on a binge of queer nonfiction, devouring Eileen Myles’ Cool for You and Inferno and Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, annotating the latter until ink from my pen took up more space per page than printer ink. The attraction isn’t just the quality of the writing—though stunning—or the presence of...
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