Small Fires: Essays (Linda Bruckheimer Series in Kentucky Literature)
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.42 (516 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 1936747022 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 184 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2014-01-13 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
It just keeps getting better If possible, memoirist and celebrated poet, Julie Marie Wade's second published work - Small Fires - is even more compelling that her first, Wishbone: A Memoir in Fractures - which won the 2011 Lambda Literary Award for lesbian biography and memoir! Or perhaps it's not that it's more compelling - perhaps it's that it gives the avid reader what she hungers for: more subtle yet profound prose from Julie Marie Wade. In either case, it's an addictive readand like all addictions, it at once satisfies and leaves the addict in psychic painhurting for more. Will
Small Fires is essay as elegy, but it is also essay as parsing, reconciliation, and celebration, all in the attempt to answer the questionwhat have you given up in order to become who you are?. There are floating tea lights in the bath, coddled blossoms in the garden, and a mother straddling her teenage daughter’s back, astringent in hand, to better scrub her not-quite-presentable pores. In Small Fires, Julie Marie Wade recreates the landscape of her childhood with a lacemaker’s care, then turns that precise attention on herself. This is a daughter’s story. And throughout, Wade traces this lost world with the same devotion as her mother among her award-winning roses
With her carefully chosen words and a studied deliberateness, Wade proves unafraid to delve into her pastto skillfully reconstruct the events of her youth, from the horrifying to the sentimental to the self-conscious and beyond. Reckoning with imperfect parentswhat they owe us and what we owe themis one of the chief tasks of these essays, which form a kind of pointillistic autobiography. I don’t really care whether this book will be called a memoir, a group of lyric essays, or a bunch of nonfiction prose-poems. Small Fires is Julie Marie Wade’s story, but the collection opens onto something universalhow we individuate from our family, how we become ourselves, what we carry forward from our pasts and make our own.”Sarah Rauch, Lambda Literary"Julie Marie Wade is an intelligent and nuanced writer in whose competent hands the tired