Even from upside-down in his recently flipped truck, Frank Soos reveals himself to be ruminative, grappling with the limitations of language to express the human condition. Moving quickly—skiing in the dark or taking long summer bike rides on Alaska highways—Soos combines an active physical life with a dark and difficult interior existence, wrestling the full span of “thinking and doing” onto the page with surprising lightness. His meditations move from fly-fishing in dangerously swift Alaska rivers to memories of the liars and dirty-joke tellers of his small-town Virginia childhood, revealing insights in new encounters and old preoccupations. Soos writes about pain and despair, aging, his divorce, his father’s passing, regret, the loss of home, and the fear of death. But in the process of confronting these dark topics, he is full of wonder. As he writes at the end of an account of almost drowning, “Bruised but whole, I was alive, alive, alive.”
Table des matières
Preface
Another Kind of Loneliness
Mont Sainte-Victoire, Approximately
I Held Their Coats: A Study of Two Jokes
A Little Iliad
Obituary with Bamboo Fly Rod
Upside-Down with Borges and Bob
Meditation on My Cousin Lou, Dead at Thirty-Three
Glamour and Romance
Other People’s Pain and My Own
The Man on the Bridge
Naked to the World
Dead Animals I Have Known
Why Is It That We Do This?
Driving Directions to the Homes of the Dead
Some Fibbers
No Place Like
Falling In
I Built a Little Boat; or, The Necessity of Failure
Kinds of Ambition
Acknowledgments
A propos de l’auteur
Soos is the Alaska State Writer Laureate for 2014-2016. He taught writing at University of Alaska Fairbanks from 1986 until 2004; his publications include Double Moon: Constructions and Conversations with Margo Klass (Boreal Books, 2009); Under Northern Lights: Writers and Artists on the Alaskan Landscape co-edited with Kes Woodward, U of Alaska Museum/UWP, 2000); Bamboo Fly Rod Suite (essays) University of Georgia, 1999; Unified Field Theory (stories) University of Georgia, 1998 (with a period as a Norton paperback); and Early Yet (stories) St. Andrews Press, 1998.
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