|
|
individual
texts
And through:
________________________________________________________________________
subscriptions
In Griffin—that crossbred creature comprised of eagle, lion, and serpent—Goldbarth joins two essays to form one animal. The first half, written on the cusp of a friend’s divorce, explores that strangely compound beast we call marriage. The second, written on the cusp of a friend’s struggle with cancer, considers that strangely compound being every one of us is: an amalgam of spirit and physical body. The resulting book is eccentric, learned, and moving. Brooding on her father’s unexplained suicide, Prevallet alternates between the clinical language of the crime report and the lyricism of the elegy. Throughout, I, Afterlife offers a defiant refusal of easy consolations or redemptions. Prevallet brings herself and her readers to the chilling but transcendent place where, as she promises, “darkness has its own resolution.” Comprised of footnotes to a non-existent text and first published in 2002, The Body: An Essay is a meditation on absence, loss, and disappearance that offers a guarded “narrative” of what may or may not be a love letter, a dream, a spiritual autobiography, a memoir, a scholarly digression, a treatise on the relation of life to book.
|
|
|