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Swerve
by Laurie Blauner
Available now at Amazon
Twenty-one lyrical, hybrid essays constitute Swerve,
Laurie Blauner s second book of essays and memoir. Some of the topics
include teeth, imagination, stealing, art, drinking, luck, surveillance,
husbands, mannequins, ghosts, mothers, noise, sleep, nature, and
animals and our attractions toward and away from everything.
Some of the essays have appeared in various magazines, including the following:
Future Notes Under Stones from Tupelo Quarterly
Swerve from Thin Air Magazine
Curses for Crooked Teeth from LIT Magazine
You can hear Laurie reading from Swerve here.
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Laurie
Blauner’s poetic hybrid essays show how intermixing genres work
together to reveal the underlying dimensions of meaning. In her
book, Swerve published by Rain Mountain Press, New York, New York,
Blauner explores the imaginary, the self and the reactions to
circumstance as if she were writing a personal diary.
...Blauner is able to use different writing techniques to enhance and
deepen her essays. They are more than hybrid. They are a
new breed.
This collection is an interesting patchwork of self-discovery and acknowledgement.... It is well worth a read.
Lynette G. Esposito, North of Oxford literary journal (read the entire review here) |
A
swerve is not a deliberate choice but rather the result of a
last-second panic, an instantaneous response to a sense of threat,
twisting to avoid a crash. Laurie Blauner’s unexpected metaphoric
disruptions are both verbal and autobiographical, radical linkages that
capture the crises of her life, her inability to stay on course and a
struggle to cope with the unexpected and escape the impact.
...Her sentences often leap into the unexpected.
She attempts to capture the root of swerving: “Everything spills into
everything else … We always transform. What stays and what leaves? I
never know what I’ll find.…”
Walter Cummins, The California Review of Books (read the entire review here) |
What
is between the real, felt, and imagined illuminates Laurie Blauner s
insightful hybrid essays. These pieces are alive with unexpected
transformations. Both amusing and profound, these essays reveal truths
about ourselves and our world. Courageous and stunning, Swerve shows us what we must leave in order to get us closer to what we want.
Rich Ives, author of A Servant s Map of the Body and RatBoy and Other Stories |
Imagine
a place of pure invention, glorious and effulgent, combined with a
voice spoken from privacy and the memoirist episodes of a life: hers,
ours, the lives of animals and trees this is Laurie Blauner soaring in
her new book of lyric essays, Swerve.
Always a writer of matchless ingenuity, Blauner s spiraling perspective
in these twenty-one essays becomes an inquiry into what it is to be
human. Are you made of clouds or breath? Do you feel fire? Ice? I am a
scarecrow left in a field wearing someone else s dress. Like the word
swerve itself, the book has many points of departure and return:
murmurations, mannequins and their misadventures, wildlife (accidental
and otherwise), kaleidoscopes and souvenirs, the ruined. Deeply
perceptive and perfectly crafted, these are elevated pieces. The mood
is alternately one of lightness, one of pathos. She unscrews one of her
hands as if that gesture proves her sensory deprivation. Then she
fastens it back again. I m going on a journey. With webs of language,
idea, and form, Blauner casts a spell. Mesmerizing and masterful.
Irresistible to dwell in this space.
Rosalind Palermo Stevenson, author of Soul, Ghost, My Absolute and The Absent |
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