Kristin Keane's encyclopedic elegy

I’ve been thinking about forms for nonfiction lately and how much I gravitate toward an organizing structure that both shapes and informs. Maybe it’s my brain’s way of reminding me I’m still a poet, even though I haven’t written many poems over the last several years. [Indeed, Facebook memories keep reminding me of my last little book tour in 2014, for a book of poems that went out of print almost as quickly as it went out into the world because the press bid farewell. (So the small press poetry life goes sometimes; when everyone’s working for the thrill of it, without institutional support, personal and professional priorities can shift over time.)]

Maybe it’s also my fondness for hybrid nonfiction. Once you start re-mixing your form, anything’s possible. Why pick the traditional narrative track when your story can instead, as Jane Alison prompts, meander, spiral, or even explode? Okay, so maybe I just like being difficult.

But Kristin Keane’s An Encyclopedia of Bending Time, a slim, elegant memoir about losing her mother, shaped as an encyclopedia (remember those?), arrived in the mail from the good folks at Barrelhouse Books at just the right time. Entries for Kant, Freud, Hawking, and Gestalt Empty Chair Technique cross-reference with entries for Home Depot, Quantum Leap, and the alien-child sitcom Out of This World. See also Diagnosis, Sorrow, Novikov Self-Consistency Principle. With a condensed lyric brevity that doesn’t sacrifice story as it invites the reader to choose their own entry into the narrative, Keane’s book is both an elegy for her mother and a meditation on loss, time, and our efforts to contain and expand it. And look at that cover! Can’t you just feel the pebbled hardcover of your childhood encyclopedia, if you are a reader of a certain age, under your fingers?

(I should say Kristin Keane and I are not related as far as I know, though we do apparently share a fondness for Quantum Leap.)

Somehow I came to have two copies of Kristin’s book. I remember pre-ordering it once, but maybe I forgot and ordered it twice? That sounds like me. So I’d like to send one out into the world to one of you.

If you’re already a subscriber to this newsletter, leave a comment with the encyclopedia entry you are most qualified to author, if only Funk & Wagnalls would return your call. If you are not a subscriber, I just ask that you sign up (this newsletter is free) before commenting. I’ll draw one entry at random next Sunday and send you an email.

Whether you are celebrating today, or mourning, or just going about your business, I hope it’s the Sunday you want and need. Over on Instagram I have some photos of my own Mom, to whom I sent one real present and one ARC of RUNAWAY, my hybrid memoir about her miraculous adolescence and my journey to understand it. Sending my mother one of my ARCs doesn’t not feel like presenting to her some macaroni art project I made in school. It’s hard to feel like a grown-up sometimes, even at my age.

What Am I Reading This Week?

• There Is Grace in Patience: On the Writing Lessons of Tarot by Abbigail Nguyen Rosewood

• The parasites inside my mother were both real and spiritual by Emily Neuharth

• Summer Brennan’s plans for Essay Camp: A May Write-Along