Morton Feldman

Friendship and Mourning in the New York Avant-Garde

Ryan Dohoney
Bloomsbury ($29.95)

by Patrick James Dunagan

Ryan Dohoney’s Morton Feldman: Friendship and Mourning in the New York Avant-Garde explores how the composer’s work was both derived from and sustained by his early friendships in the 1950s Abstract Expressionist scene in New York City. Dahoney gives special emphasis to the impact of the tragic early death of poet Frank O’Hara in 1966 and the falling out experienced between Feldman and painter Philip Guston in 1970, but he also touches upon less celebrated artistic affiliations of Feldman’s, such as with dancer Merle Marsicano. There’s little gossip: the author largely avoids sentimental clichés or otherwise overt pandering to emotional cues and dramatic scenes. After all, even as “Feldman relished intimate details and preferred performances between friends,” he wasn’t known publicly or privately for expressing his emotions (aside from existential despair over his art), and his minimalist compositions are anything but effusive in terms of displaying personal feeling. Yet Dohoney succinctly demonstrates that friendship indeed lies at the heart of several of Feldman’s paramount pieces of music.

Pages of Feldman’s scores are reproduced as his own writings and talks are cited alongside critical commentary. Works by the other artists are likewise discussed; Dohoney draws upon outside criticism for useful comparisons with Feldman’s work. For instance, two Feldman compositions, Three Clarinets, Cello, and Piano and For Frank O’Hara were each at one time entitled In Memory of My Feelings, a well-known longer poem of O’Hara’s;

As Nick Shelby notes, the final sections of the poem are marked by an attempt to reconfigure a sense of self out of the collage of images and experiences. This corresponds to Feldman’s own creation of music, which attempts to get itself together, to build up a coherent sense of progression or movement from fragmentary gestures that can seem aimless or inchoate.

Dohoney is a sympathetic and well-informed reader/listener. He recognizes “the precariousness of Feldman’s social ties” and brings them to the fore while noting that “friendship is not always a positive force—it is sometimes an underdetermined name for remarkably varied attachments.” What once sustained a friendship understandably undergoes transformation over several years. With Guston, the ties the two shared during the heyday of 1950s New York proved unsustainable after Guston’s turn towards (crude) figuration as he ceased to resist the figure’s emergence in his work. His struggle with abstraction had moved forward to another stage. At Guston’s infamous 1970 Marlborough gallery show, full of cartoon-like images of heads, coats, shoes, rocks, and other debris of life, Feldman failed to support the change of direction and the two were never in direct conversation again.

The reader can’t help but feel melancholy that the days of spending hours hanging around each other in Guston’s studio, followed by deli sandwiches or long dinners at Chinese restaurants while bantering about their inner struggles, were over. Dohoney describes how at Marlborough, Guston “needed Morty’s opinion instantly, to feel Morty’s affection and understanding to keep going. And he didn’t get it in time. The ‘truth of abstraction’ proved stronger for Feldman than friendship itself. Therein lies the tragedy.” They remained silently in dialogue throughout the years, however; Guston painted images recollective of Feldman into pieces from the ’70s, just as Feldman composed For Philip Guston in tribute to his old friend after Guston’s passing. Feldman also honored one of Guston’s final requests: that he read the Kaddish over his grave.

For Dohoney, there’s no doubt of friendship having been the motivating influence upon Feldman. More so, he’s adamant that his survey of Feldman’s work demonstrates just how vital friendship was within the wider context of the era: “Feldman’s laments for his community provide clear evidence that friendship in fact produced New York School modernism.” Whether all readers agree or not, Dohoney’s argument is quite persuasive, especially when it comes to the heart of his study: engaging with the composer’s work. He suggests that “Feldman’s music encourages us to hear and feel this loss of coterie as an afterimage—something vanished yet affectively present.” Indeed, Feldman always kept on going with the work even when the impetus of friendship that once sustained it had moved on. Like all great artists, he had no choice.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2022 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2022

A Permeable Border: Nina LaCour and Kelly Barnhill on the Line Between YA and Adult Fiction

by Trisha Collopy

In six novels for young adults, including Everything Leads to You and the Printz Award-winning We Are Okay, Nina LaCour has carved out a fictional terrain in the liminal space between late adolescence and early adulthood, exploring themes of grief, loss and the ways people move forward, despite those setbacks. Yerba Buena (Flatiron Books, $26.99), her first novel for adults, follows Sara Foster, who flees a devastating discovery in her hometown to Los Angeles; there, she finds a precarious emotional balance that is challenged when she begins a relationship with a young florist, Emilie.

Minneapolis writer Kelly Barnhill has written five novels for middle-grade readers, including The Girl Who Drank the Moon, which won the Newbery Award, and The Ogress and the Orphans, published earlier this year. Her imaginary worlds are rich with inventive detours (including, in Ogress, an endless library and opinionated crows), even as they explore deeply skewed power structures and the ways young people push back against an unjust world. Barnhill also published her first novel for adults this spring: When Women Were Dragons (Doubleday, $28) imagines a country frozen in the rigid gender roles of the 1950s, where women have so much suppressed rage that they turn into dragons.

Both LaCour and Barnhill teach in the low-residency MFA program in writing for children and young adults at Hamline University in St. Paul. The following conversation focuses on the boundaries between young-adult and adult fiction, and what that distinction means for writers shaping a story and for the readers who find it.

Trisha Collopy: Nina, the opening of Yerba Buena feels like it had a darkness behind it, and that's really haunted me. What was the seed of that story for you? And when did you know that this book might be edging out of the audience you had previously been writing for?

Nina LaCour: I always knew that this was an adult novel, because I knew that I was going to be following the characters in their twenties and maybe thirties, so going into it with that knowledge allowed me to explore the things that happened to Sara. It gave me permission to stay focused on the story and what I felt the story needed, and not to care as much about protecting my readers. I always write truthfully, and I always want to tell an honest story, but when I write for young people, I am conscious of who I'm asking to read this book—and I do it in a way that I feel holds them close as I explore really hard things. In writing for adults, I felt less of a responsibility to hold my readers close; rather, I felt like I am an adult telling another adult a story. We all have had to face hard things in our lives. So yeah, it was with less of a sense of responsibility to the reader and more of a sense of responsibility to this story.

TC: Kelly, when did you know you were writing a novel for adults?

Kelly Barnhill: I had kind of sworn off writing—again—but I was asked to contribute a short story to an anthology of dragon stories, and you don’t say no to Jonathan Strahan, because he’s so nice. I was in the car with my daughter, and we were listening to the Brett Kavanaugh hearings. Normally, she turns off the radio and turns on her Spotify so we don't talk—teenagers—but we were both sort of leaning forward listening. And I realized that I was her exact same age, fifteen, when Anita Hill took the stand, and here we were exactly one generation later doing the same damn thing and about to make the same damn mistake. That was so devastating to me.

She gets out of the car and goes to play practice like normal, but I am basically turning into a supernova in my minivan driving home: I thought, I'm gonna write a short story for Jonathan Strahan, and it is going to be about a bunch of 1950s housewives who turn into dragons and eat their husbands and every other man who did something wrong with them. By the end of a week of writing, I realized, oh, I'm not writing a short story at all, this is something else.

There was a question about marketing this book, and it’s funny because it is being marketed as an adult book here in the U.S. and a YA book in England. For me, it has to do with the view of the piece. I think in middle grade the view is outward, asking big questions—What is truth? What is love? What is friendship—trying to understand how the world works, and how everything fits together. With YA, the view tends to be inward, posing questions of identity: Who am I? And do I matter? I've never been a person to do A, B, or C, but now I am a person who has done A, B and C, and now I'm going to be that person forever. And of course, that isn't true, but it sure as hell feels true when you're fifteen. Which is why if you ask a ten-year-old, what do you want to be when you grow up, they'll still tell you twenty things, and four of them are imaginary. Whereas if you ask a fifteen-year-old, “what do you want to be when you grow up?,” they say, “why are you making aggressive eye contact with me right now?”

For adult fiction, the view is backward: How did we get here? And what does it mean? Those are kind of quick and dirty distinctions, but when I realized I was writing a novel, it was very clear to me that I was dealing with memory and how our contextualization of memory shifts over time. And so there really wasn't a question for me at all as to what I was doing.

TC: Is the line between YA and adult fiction artificial? As you're teaching your students, how are you saying here's where you walk up to that line, and here's where you're doing something else?

NL: I think more than that, I believe in "Write the thing." If you're unsure, just write the thing, and then figure out what it is afterwards. One of the beauties of YA is that it allows teenagers to read stories about people who are going through the things that they're going through at the time that they're going through it. And, you know, if done well, it gives a lot of respect to that experience, in a way that sometimes other representations of teen experiences can be sort of dismissive or jaded. But of course, teens read adult fiction all the time; adults read YA and middle grade fiction all the time. We need different stories at different times.

And I do think some of it is just marketing. Ruta Sepetys also has books that are YA in the United States and adult books in other countries; the distinction does tend to get blurry. But also, we writers do ask ourselves, who is the ideal reader for this book? That is why directionality in the book’s point of view is helpful to me. Because a book is not just a stationary object, and the story doesn't happen on the page—the story happens in that space between the reader and the page. We are asking our readers to be full partners in the building of the story. So that question of which direction is this piece looking becomes useful.

TC: That gives readers so much permission to enjoy YA at any age.

NL: People think of YA as being about coming of age, but Yerba Buena is about stepping into adulthood. I really loved being free to explore what happens after those teen years: life experiences that define what we do next. In Yerba Buena, I was able to ask, how do those defining experiences shape how people are in their professional lives, their love lives, and their adult relationships with immediate family? And what does it take for people to really face the things that they've gone through? What does it take for us to realize that the coping mechanisms, or the self-protective tendencies that we have created for ourselves, are no longer serving us, and we need to let some of that go in order to have a more open heart in the new relationships that we choose? It was very exciting to be able to explore that.

TC: Kelly, do you feel like The Ogress and the Orphans and When Women Were Dragons are in communication with each other in any way?

KB: I mean, now I do. The thing is, everything that we see, we've seen before—on all these terrible things that we're struggling against and pushing against. So, on one hand, [both books] speak to this moment, but they also speak to “we’ve seen where this goes, and it is not great.” And we will see it again, this yearning for a strong man, this denial of history, this denigration of others . . . we've been here before, right? We've been here before, and we're gonna be here again, which is why any kind of meditation, whether allegorical or otherwise, is helpful. It helps us recognize those patterns when they assert themselves, and it helps to create a counternarrative to push back against them.

Click here to purchase When Women Were Dragons at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase Yerba Buena at your local independent bookstore

Fall 2022

Interviews

A Permeable Border:
Nina LaCour and Kelly Barnhill on the Line Between YA and Adult Fiction
Interviewed by Trisha Collopy
Two Minnesota authors, known for their work for young readers but who have branched out by writing novels for adults, here discuss what that distinction means for writers shaping a story and for the readers who find it.

Anything Is Possible: An Interview with Kathleen Rooney
Interviewed by Rachel Robbins
Kathleen Rooney talks about her new poetry collection, Where Are the Snows (Texas Review Press)—plus, the apocalypse as luxury, humor in politics, and what it means to write for an audience.

Features

Peter Handke: The Fruit Thief and Quiet Places
Taken in tandem, Peter Handke's The Fruit Thief (translated by Krishna Winston) and Quiet Places (translated by Krishna Winston and Ralph Manheim) indeed offer the exploration of humanity’s "periphery and specificity" referred to in the Swedish Academy’s Nobel citation of his work. Reviewed by John Toren

Defining Language: Three Native American Poets
Three recent books by Native American poets explore the brutality of colonization, the writer’s mind, and the aftermath of displacement. Reviewed by Nancy Beauregard

Fresh Takes on Keats
The books about John Keats keep coming, delivering fresh angles of approach. Thanks to new biographies from Lucasta Miller and Jonathan Bate, we gain new insights into Keats’s life and literary affinities. Reviewed by Mike Dillon

Poetry Reviews

Star Lake
Arda Collins
Star Lake may take you by surprise: The archness and dark humor in Arda Collins’ previous collection are gone, and in their place is a significantly sparer, more tender, and even vulnerable poetry. Reviewed by Dobby Gibson

The Golden Dot
Gregory Corso
For any admirer of Gregory Corso, there is much to be relished in The Golden Dot: dash and dark fire, offbeat insights, and a serious engagement with the unfathomable mystery at the heart of things. Reviewed by Gregory Stephenson

Sift
Christian Hawkey
In Sift, Christian Hawkey addresses the intertwining of as many subjects as one would find in their internet feed—politics, parenthood, capitalism, mundanity—through the framework of his own etymology-tracing, language-dissecting task as translator. Reviewed by Michael Overstreet

The Many Deaths of Inocencio Rodriguez
Iliana Rocha
In this startling collection, Iliana Rocha writes about the unsolved homicide of her grandfather in Detroit in 1971. To have empathy, she suggests, we must know the darker side of humanity. Reviewed by George Longenecker

The New Sun Time
Ish Klein
In a time of multiple crises, the poems of The New Sun Time by Ish Klein work toward liberation and healing. Reviewed by Robert Fernandez

Nonfiction Reviews

Morton Feldman: Friendship and Mourning in the New York Avant-Garde
Ryan Dohoney
Though Morton Feldman wasn’t known for expressing his emotions and his minimalist compositions are anything but effusive, Ryan Dohoney demonstrates that friendship indeed lies at the heart of several of Feldman’s paramount pieces of music. Reviewed by Patrick James Dunagan

The Diary of Others: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin
Edited by Paul Herron
If Anaïs Nin's Diary reveals anything to us, it is the multidimensionality of a remarkably complex personality determined not only to explore life fully but to understand it as well. Reviewed by Robert Zaller

The Fight to Save the Town: Reimagining Discarded America
Michelle Wilde Anderson
Michelle Wilde Anderson offers a hard-hitting yet hopeful look at places lost in the wilds of income inequality, crime, lack of education, and poor infrastructure. Reviewed by Jonathan Shipley

This Monk Wears Heels: Be Who You Are
Kodo Nishimura
In This Monk Wears Heels, Kodo Nishimura converses like a friend, giving insight into his personal evolution, as well as make-up tips and bits of Buddhist philosophy. Reviewed by Aditi Yadav

Notes from the Road
Mike Ingram
In Notes from the Road, Mike Ingram offers a moving account of a cross-country car journey—but the real trip is, of course, toward the self. Reviewed by Guillermo Rebollo Gil

Fiction Reviews

Till the Wheels Fall Off
Brad Zellar
Like listening to a favorite album, Brad Zellar’s novel Till the Wheels Fall Off offers the alternating effects of revelation and affirmation when life’s pivotal moments require a soundtrack. Reviewed by Frank Randall

The Scent of Light
Kristjana Gunnars
Kristjana Gunnars’s The Scent of Light is a work unyielding in its sensuality, uniquely attuned to the slippery nature of reading in the Information Age. Reviewed by Dashiel Carrera

The Secret of Geraniums
Jessy Reine
Jessy Reine’s novella reconsiders the confines of acceptable boundaries within romantic relationships, pushing past traditional stories of perverse encounters with dominant men and offering instead a feminine account of love. Reviewed by Havilah Barnett

Drama Reviews

Mumbai Traps: Collected Plays
Anju Makhija
Readers familiar with Anju Makhija’s crisp and sharply-observant poetry will find that as a playwright, she is gumptious, experimental, piercing, and clutter-breaking. Reviewed by Rochelle Potkar

Graphic Novel Reviews

Time Zone J
Julie Doucet
The “Julie Doucet” of Time Zone J plays out the acclaimed cartoonist's antipathy toward autobiography and representation—especially as they relate to memory, which sets this graphic novel novel in motion, and to desire, its beating heart. Reviewed by Steve Matuszak

PAUL CHAN

A Discussion on the Art of Publishing

Wednesday, November 9, 7 pm
The Hook & Ladder Theater
3010 Minnehaha Ave, Minneapolis

Co-presented by Rain Taxi and the Walker Art Center

Join us as we welcome celebrated artist Paul Chan for a conversation on the art of publishing, in all its messy social practice! This event is free.

Born in Hong Kong in 1973, New York-based artist, writer, and publisher Paul Chan came to prominence in the early 2000s with vibrant moving image works that touched upon aspects of war, religion, pleasure, and politics. In 2009, following a decade of art-making, Chan embarked on a self-imposed break, turning his attention to publishing and the economics of information by founding the press Badlands Unlimited, which experiments with a range of conceptual and material publishing practices.

At this special Twin Cities event, Paul Chan joins Rain Taxi editor Eric Lorberer for a conversation in the spirit of Badlands about the artistry of independent publishing. Also sure to be discussed will be Chan's new book Above All Waves: Wisdom from Tominaga Nakamoto, the Philosopher Rumored to Have Inspired Bitcoin, and local independent writers, artists, publishers, and booksellers will be part of the mix too. It’s a meeting of the minds not to be missed!

Copies of Breathers, Above All Waves, and a selection of other books (by Paul Chan, by Badlands, by Rain Taxi, and by innovative Twin Cities publishers) will be available for purchase, and a book signing and reception will follow the talk.

Note: For the opening of the Walker Art Center exhibition Paul Chan: Breathers, curated by Pavel S. Pyś with Matthew Villar Miranda, Paul Chan will be in conversation with writer Aruna D'Souza on Thursday, November 17 at 6 pm—also highly recommended! For more details about this event, see here.

Volume 27, Number 3, Fall 2022 (#107)

To purchase issue #107 using Paypal, click here.

INTERVIEWS

Ryan Blacketter: His Own Private Idaho | interviewed by Arthur Shattuck O’Keefe
Hillary Leftwich: The Power of Intention | interviewed by Zack Kopp

FEATURES

Elements of the Icelandic Saga | by Emil Siekkinen
The New Life | a comic by Gary Sullivan
On Writing in Public and Helping the Public Write | by Eric Elshtain

Plus: cover art by Kameron White

FICTION REVIEWS:

NONFICTION / MIXED GENRE REVIEWS:

Late Fragments: Flares, My Heart Laid Bare, Prose Poems, Belgium Disrobed | Charles Baudelaire | by Patrick James Dunagan
The Flag, The Cross, and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at His Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened | Bill McKibben | by James Lenfestey
Ways of Walking | Ann de Forest, ed. | by Joe Samuel Starnes
What’s Good: Notes on Rap and Language | Daniel Levin Becker | by Grace Utomo
Becoming Story: A Journey among Seasons, Places, Trees, and Ancestors | Greg Sarris | by Dustin Michael
The Orphic Voice: Poetry and Natural History | Elizabeth Sewell | by Patrick James Dunagan
The Clean Daughter: A Cross-Continental Memoir | Jill Kandel | by Sandra Eliason
The Naked Don’t Fear the Water: An Underground Journey with Afghan Refugees | Matthieu Aikins | by Jonathan Shipley

POETRY REVIEWS:

COMICS REVIEWS:

Flung Out Of Space: Inspired by the Indecent Adventures of Patricia Highsmith | Grace Ellis and Hannah Templer | by Greg Baldino

KAMERON WHITE

Kameron White is a comic artist, illustrator, and designer that specializes in fantasy, superhero, and slice-of-life comics while also illustrating stylized depictions of diverse groups and putting out bold and colorful pieces. He’s worked on horror anthologies, LGBTQ+ anthologies, and Indie comics. Learn more on his website at spacejamkam.com.

TITS ON THE MOON

by Dessa

38 pages, perfect bound
Published October 2022

Tits on the Moon features a dozen “stage poems,” many of which Dessa performs at her legendary live shows; they’re funny, weird, and occasionally bittersweet. The collection opens with a short essay on craft (and the importance of having a spare poem around for when the power goes out). Proudly published by Rain Taxi in association with Doomtree, Tits on the Moon features a stunning cover pressed with gold foil and structurally embossed, designed by Studio on Fire.

$15, plus $4 shipping in the U.S.; contact us for International shipping costs

Order with Domestic Shipping

For more about Dessa, visit dessawander.com or find her online at @dessa on Instagram and @dessadarling on Twitter/Facebook.

2022 Kerlan Award: Andrea Davis Pinkney | A Twin Cities Book Festival Event

Sponsored by the University of Minnesota Libraries
Tuesday, October 11, 2022
6:00 p.m. Central

Please join us to celebrate the winner of the 2022 Kerlan Award, the renowned Andrea Davis Pinkney! This event is free to attend.

The Kerlan Award is given annually by the Friends of the Kerlan Collection of Children’s Literature at the University of Minnesota Libraries in recognition of singular attainments in the field, and that certainly applies here: Andrea Davis Pinkney is the distinguished and bestselling author of numerous books for children and young adults, including picture books, novels, and nonfiction. Her books have received multiple Coretta Scott King Book Awards, Jane Addams Honor citations, nominations for the NAACP Image Awards, the Boston Globe/Horn Book Honor medal, and many other accolades. In addition to her work as an author, Ms. Pinkney has had an illustrious career as a children’s book publisher and editor, including as founder of the first African American children’s book imprint at a major publishing company, Jump at the Sun.

Pinkney also is the librettist for the Houston Grand Opera’s “The Snowy Day Opera,” based on the beloved bestselling children’s picture book classic “The Snowy Day” by Ezra Jack Keats. She has served on the creative teams for several theatrical and audio productions based on works for young people, including those drawn from among her acclaimed books, “Martin Rising: Requiem for a King,” “The Red Pencil,” and “Rhythm Ride: A Trip through the Motown Sound.” She lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Purchase books by Andrea Davis Pinkney from Red Balloon Bookshop:

Buy Books

Your purchase supports both Rain Taxi and a great independent bookstore!

About the Kerlan Collection

The Kerlan Collection of Children’s Literature stands at the forefront of children’s literature archives worldwide. An internationally recognized children’s literature library and archive, the Kerlan holds more than 100,000 children’s books, original manuscripts, correspondence, artworks, galleys, color proofs, and other material for more than 1,700 authors and illustrators. Open to the public at the University of Minnesota’s Elmer L. Andersen Library, the Kerlan is a rich resource for researchers, educators, families, and all who love children’s literature.

Jeffrey Archer | A Twin Cities Book Festival Event

Tuesday September 27
3:00 pm Central
Crowdcast

Join us for a virtual visit with the international bestselling British author Booklist calls a “genre master,” Jeffrey Archer. At this special publication day event, Archer will discuss his latest novel, Next in Line, with Minnesota mystery writer Carl Brookins.

Free to attend, registration required. We hope to “see” you there!

If you can’t attend the live broadcast, register anyway
and you’ll be able to watch the replay whenever you like!

Purchase a copy of Next in Line (with signed bookplate while supplies last!) and other books by Jeffrey Archer from Magers & Quinn Booksellers:

Buy the Book

Your purchase supports both Rain Taxi and a great independent bookstore!

About the Book

In this latest installment of Jeffrey Archer’s acclaimed William Warwick series, set in 1988, royal fever sweeps the nation as Britain falls in love with the “people’s princess,” Princess Diana. For Scotland Yard, this means the focus is on protecting the most famous family on earth, and a weak link could spell disaster. When it becomes clear a renegade organization has the security of the country in its sights, the question is: which target is next in line? During Archer’s tenure as a member of the UK Parliament and volunteer work as a charity auctioneer, he worked with the late Princess Diana on numerous occasions, and he has sought to channel her effervescent warmth, mischievous sense of humor, and world-beloved humanity in this novel, which appears shortly after the 25th anniversary of her untimely passing.

About the Authors

Jeffrey Archer, whose novels and short stories include the Clifton Chronicles, the William Warwick novels, Kane and Abel, and Cat O’ Nine Tales, has topped the bestseller lists around the world, with sales of over 275 million copies. He is the only author ever to have been a number one bestseller in fiction, short stories and non-fiction (The Prison Diaries). A member of the House of Lords for over a quarter of a century, he is married to Dame Mary Archer, and they have two sons, two granddaughters, and two grandsons.

Carl Brookins writes the Michael Tanner and Mary Whitney sailing adventure series, the Sean Sean private investigator detective series, and the Jack Marston academic series. He has reviewed mystery fiction for the Saint Paul Pioneer Press and elsewhere; before he became a mystery writer, he was a photographer, television program director, and college teacher, and he continues to be an avid recreational sailor. A member of Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, and Private Eye Writers of America, he lives with his wife Jean in Roseville, Minnesota.

The Child

Kjersti A. Skomsvold
Translated by Martin Aitken
Open Letter ($15.95)

by J. Ahana-Laba

Although often sentimentalized, motherhood can be a distinctly jarring experience, one rife with resurfaced pains, tender loves, and the echo of long-lost memories. In The Child, Kjersti A. Skomsvold does not shy away from the brutal truth of the matter; she exposes us to a luminous, impassioned chronicle in which the tragedies and ecstasies of motherhood will trample and simultaneously renew the heart of the reader with unbridled force.

With lines like “I thought about the deepest darkness in which the child lay, and there I was, making it even darker with all my miserable thoughts,” Skomsvold breathes life to depression; deep-set anguish is laced in prose-poetic language, and a shot of raw intensity penetrates its pith. Recollection of this darkness that sweeps through the psyche and stalks it with infirmity, self-loathing, and sorrow is juxtaposed with vignettes regaling the euphoria of life in the form of a budding relationship with the narrator’s husband Bo — and a palpable being budding into existence.

Life is chock-full of regrets and woe. The narrator has an old lover too, one with whom she has a powerful but tumultuous bond — and she witnesses first-hand the decay of this lover, as he slips into bleak pitfalls, alcoholism, and numbness to life without her. As he plummets further and further into despair, she realizes she must sever the bond. Not long after, however, the lover commits suicide. “I think he wanted to live, but that it was too difficult for him.”

In the process of burgeoning motherhood, all these memories come surging back to her, though she wonders “if the guilt I feel means that I’m guilty.” She is frightened by her memories; she believes they may poison her forthcoming children and her relationship with Bo, and that she may be too broken to live a life of her own. Untamed ripples of pain divorce her from rationality, engulf every ounce of her vitality. But when she first bonded with the man, she learned to untangle the mass of her unresolved traumas and, for the first time, discovered the freedom of vulnerability. It is a gradual process. She must write, she must declare love, because in doing so, she lays herself bare for others to see, and more importantly, for herself. When she says, “I felt life streaming into me,” she persuades us that our life, too, may be worth preserving.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore