Waking the Bones Elizabeth Kirschner 9781939739605 Books
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A beautiful memoir by noted a noted poet. "Elizabeth Kirschner is a poet of the very first order, and in this luminous, captivating memoir, she weaves poetry and prose into something transcendent and heartbreakingly beautiful. It is rare to see a writer with all their talents on display at one time like this." -Susan Conley, author of Paris Was the Place and The Foremost Good Fortune
"Waking the Bones is a vivid and haunting memoir about love and loss; more precisely, it's powerful, lyrical testimony about how love and abuse can mingle in a deeply dysfunctional family until every emotional defense breaks down into madness or near-madness. It's also about recovery and the salvage operation that rescues sanity and makes survival, and perhaps even happiness, possible. A marvelous book; I highly recommend it." -Alan Davis, author of So Bravely Vegetative and Alone with the Owl.
Waking the Bones Elizabeth Kirschner 9781939739605 Books
Waking the Bones is a sometimes-harrowing memoir of one who has survived the gauntlet of a monumentally dysfunctional childhood upbringing and the madness inherent with the experience of having been institutionalized. Kirschner weaves her tale with a fecundity of beautifully crafted poetic prose and fantastical imagery grounded in nature. This is a woman who is at once earthy and mystical. Waking the Bones is The Brothers Grimm meets Mommie Dearest; Little Bits the tormented child becoming Elizabeth the nurturing mother to her son, for whom this book is dedicated. Kirschner’s Sea Cabin refuge, her ultimate and intimate destination, is a house on the border between Here and There, somewhere beyond the City; a place where Somehow reality and fantasy can intertwine and mortals can believe in fairies. Finally, a place where the author has resolved to find a measure of contentment and peace.Product details
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Tags : Waking the Bones [Elizabeth Kirschner] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. A beautiful memoir by noted a noted poet. Elizabeth Kirschner is a poet of the very first order, and in this luminous,Elizabeth Kirschner,Waking the Bones,Piscataqua Press,1939739608,BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY Personal Memoirs,Biography Autobiography,Memoirs,Personal Memoirs
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Waking the Bones Elizabeth Kirschner 9781939739605 Books Reviews
Knowing Elizabeth first as a poetry teacher and mentor, this book tells a story I could not have envisioned. This memoir reveals her deep struggle to overcome a traumatic childhood with such courage and precision that it made me cry each time I picked it up. She articulates with such original and telling imagery - her mother's legs being as thin as fiddle bows, her heart, a speck floating in a fertile egg - bathing the text in a beauty that contrasts starkly with both the inner and outer world she describes. She has indeed triumphed with her life at her beloved Sea Cabin at Spruce Cove. I had already signed up for her memoir class before I read the book, for mid-November. Now, I wonder if I will be up to the task of writing my memoir, of being able to be as vulnerable and authentic as she has been with this brave book. Of course, that is the challenge of all poets and writers. Otherwise, why bother.
" Waking the Bones" is one of those memoirs one dreams about reading -- a gutsy, shameless, prose poem of the highest lyrical order that leaves one in awe of the process and the talent put out by the author. Kirschner unavoidably raises herself above the masses by layering a kaleidescope of childhood memories underneath and on top of her present adult self, digging down so deep in some chapters that one is relieved that the subsequent chapter brings her back up into the light. Thank goodness Kirschner is, first, a poet. Then thank goodness she decided to share her survival story. The two have brought us a brilliant expose filled with terror and love on the same page.
"Waking the Bones" is intense with familiar images of everything that ever happened to everybody, or almost did. It is a biography of man and woman, mother and father, daughter and siblings. It is universal in scope even though it is a singular voice. It is ever a chameleon, changing
mode, tone and color despite it's diminuitive size. It should be required reading for all psychiatrists, counselors, and those afflicted with even the slightest mental illness.
" Waking the Bones" puts salve on wounds just by existing as a literary accomplishment. A very important book for Kirschner, but equally important for readers everywhere. It's a reality show of the highest order. Read it and be changed.
Reviewed by Allison Keene
In her memoir Waking the Bones, Elizabeth Kirschner unravels the snarled strings of her life, weaving connections between her childhood traumas, her adult mental illness, and the redemptive power of self-reliance.
Kirschner divides her memoir into clear sections, each of which anchors the short, poetic chapters within to a specific span of years and to a particular location. Despite these confinements, the individual chapters are airy and dynamic, and Kirschner’s language is alight with sensory detail and a feeling of constant, fluttering movement. Often, this movement is most apparent when Kirschner – called “Little Bits” as a child – escapes the dangers of her domestic life and seeks refuge in nature
I, Little Bits, dost remain in the vast, blue woods of my childhood from scantest dawn to decanted twilight, rare as the cherry womb of a lady-slipper. Here I scramble onto downed trunks whose roots span the girth of Catherine wheels, trunks whose spongy insides are stuffed with what seems like crimson-brown catkins. I wonder does the catkin fairy nest in that puffy stuff? Does she dingle-dangle on twigs, or slinky-slink with sea-green inchworms?
Kirschner’s poetic prose plays with both speed and sound, starting with low, deep vowels sounds that anchor it (and Little Bits) to the ground – “downed trunks whose roots span the girth.” Then, the narration beings to lilt upwards, building to sharp consonants and tight, light vowels – “Does she dingle-dangle on twigs, or slinky-slink.” Though she is weighed down by immense childhood trauma, Little Bits is as bright and airy as her narration, darting and hovering between images like the monarch butterfly whose migrations she traces throughout the book. Kirschner never loses this childlike voice, nor the impression of speed and sensory distraction. Elizabeth the woman maintains the sporadic wonder of Little Bits the child, attracted to beauty and ephemera, fantasy and poetry.
Even as the memoir moves forward in time – progressing from Little Bits’ chaotic childhood through Elizabeth’s marriage, the birth of her son, Ryan, and her eventual institutionalization and divorce – the story maintains its fluttering narrative style. Kirschner’s chapters continue to resist the temporal order that the section headings ascribe them, often beginning with phrases that destabilize an attempt at ordering the narrative at all
“After a long death, I started to come back.”
“In time, over time and through time, I continue to cross three bridges and states to see Ryan.”
“Soon after, long after Dad goes to the other side, the seizures start.”
These gestures intentionally unravel time, drawing the reader’s attention to the way that all the moments that Kirschner describes – childhood, marriage, illness, divorce – inform and shape each other. It’s of no consequence if a moment occurs “soon after, long after” another moment in linear time, since all moments occur simultaneously in her memory. Little Bits/ Kirschner are in constant motion alongside and against each other, colliding into one another and their memories as they try to make sense of their story.
Woven amongst these fragments is a complex question about love and blame. In spite of Kirschner’s painful childhood, suffered at the hands of abusive parents, she chooses not to challenge or condemn them for their transgressions against her. Kirschner knows that her bones are not her own – they belong (at least in part) to the family history that created her, the tangled knot of stories, relationships, and people that produced her damaged (and damaging) parents and her own wounded self. Her bones are fragile, like the skeleton of a fallen bird that she and her son once found in their garden, and they’re flimsy, like the material of the skeleton costume that she wore while her father abused her as a child. However, fragile and flimsy bones are also her foundation, and they are the tools that she uses to rebuild her life after the unraveling of her marriage.
Kirschner often refers to her Sea Cabin—the home in coastal Main that she rebuilds after her divorce. She calls the process of rebuilding the house “waking the bones,” stressing that, in rehabilitating the house, she is also rehabilitating herself. Kirschner doesn’t reject her damaged foundation – her old and wounded bones. She merely accepts that she has been “Kirschnerized,” that her loss expands her, propels her, and is part of her heritage.
At the conclusion of her dynamic and emotive memoir, Kirschner leaves her readers with a sense of hard-won wholeness and peace. Kirschner continues to renovate her Sea Cabin, feeling, as she does so, her damaged mind and body begin to heal
Because I go after it, through, under and over my healing, I braid it into the plaits of my being. By doing so, I learn that a mad mind can heal, but a mad soul – Mom, Dad’s – can’t. My mind is a lighthouse, greenhouse, moonhouse. It’s a dream structure built upon a foundation of boulders caulked by starlight and mission figs. It’s not only built to last beyond my own lasting, but out of a fabric transient as tears, a hope that’s not easily undone.
Elizabeth Kirschner delves into the pain, complexity, and rich colors of human brokenness. Every word should be savored for the honesty of a portrait painted with vivid emotional hues that takes the reader on a journey through suffering, the vulnerability of love, which points toward healing and personal resurrection. The beauty and profound insight achieved through the sharing of the author's story will captivate your senses, your conscience, and intellect.
Waking the Bones is a sometimes-harrowing memoir of one who has survived the gauntlet of a monumentally dysfunctional childhood upbringing and the madness inherent with the experience of having been institutionalized. Kirschner weaves her tale with a fecundity of beautifully crafted poetic prose and fantastical imagery grounded in nature. This is a woman who is at once earthy and mystical. Waking the Bones is The Brothers Grimm meets Mommie Dearest; Little Bits the tormented child becoming Elizabeth the nurturing mother to her son, for whom this book is dedicated. Kirschner’s Sea Cabin refuge, her ultimate and intimate destination, is a house on the border between Here and There, somewhere beyond the City; a place where Somehow reality and fantasy can intertwine and mortals can believe in fairies. Finally, a place where the author has resolved to find a measure of contentment and peace.
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