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Small Fires

Essays

Julie Marie Wade

$44.95

Paperback

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English
Sarabande Books, Incorporated
15 November 2011
This is a daughter's story. In ""Small Fires,"" Julie Marie Wade recreates the landscape of her childhood with a lacemaker's care, then turns that precise attention on herself. 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. And throughout, Wade traces this lost world with the same devotion as her mother among her award-winning roses. ""Small Fires"" is essay as elegy, but it is also essay as parsing, reconciliation, and celebration, all in the attempt to answer the question--what have you given up in order to become who you are?
By:  
Imprint:   Sarabande Books, Incorporated
Country of Publication:   United States
Dimensions:   Height: 215mm,  Width: 139mm,  Spine: 15mm
Weight:   255g
ISBN:   9781936747023
ISBN 10:   1936747022
Series:   Linda Bruckheimer Series in Kentucky Literature
Pages:   184
Publication Date:  
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Keepsake Triptych of My Grandmother Three Keys Triptych of My Mother Skin Bone Four Eyes in a Dark Room Triptych of My Aunt Linda Meditation 29 Traveling Triptych of My Father The Flower of Afterthought

Julie Marie Wade is the author of Wishbone: A Memoir in Fractures (Colgate University Press, 2010) and the poetry collections Without (Finishing Line Press, 2010) and Postage Due (White Pine Press, 2013). She has received the Chicago Literary Award in Poetry (2004), the Gulf Coast Nonfiction Prize (2004), the Arts & Letters Nonfiction Prize (2010), and an Al Smith Individual Artist Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council (2010). Wade has a Master of Arts in English at Western Washington University and a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry at the University of Pittsburgh and lives with her partner Angie and their two cats in the Bluegrass State, where she is a doctoral student and graduate teaching fellow in the Humanities department at the University of Louisville.

Reviews for Small Fires: Essays

Reckoning with imperfect parents--what they owe us and what we owe them--is one of the chief tasks of these essays, which form a kind of pointillistic autobiography. Another is the construction of memories, even imagined, in which understanding and forgiveness trump judgment and hate. <br>--Kate Tuttle, Boston Globe <br><br> Small Fires is intelligent and elegant, shocking and saddening, heartfelt and hopeful. <br>--Cindy Wolfe Boynton, Minneapolis Star Tribune <br><br> In Small Fires , Julie Marie Wade. . . considers family and memory with a poetic eye and unabashed tongue. With her carefully chosen words and a studied deliberateness, Wade proves unafraid to delve into her past--to skillfully reconstruct the events of her youth, from the horrifying to the sentimental to the self-conscious and beyond. . . . Small Fires is Julie Marie Wade's story, but the collection opens onto something universal--how we individuate from our family, how we become ourselves, what we carry forward from our pasts and make our own. <br>--Sarah Rauch, Lambda Literary <br><br> Julie Marie Wade is an intelligent and nuanced writer in whose competent hands the tired old tale of the broken family is invigorated and renewed. 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. Whatever it's called, it is exquisitely made and cuts right to the heart. <br>--Rebecca Brown<br>


  • Commended for Lambda Literary Awards (Lesbian Memoir/Biography) 2012

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