Calamities

By Renee Gladman Description Reviews WINNER of the 2017 Firecracker Award for Nonfiction from the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP)A collection of linked essays concerned with the life and mind of the writer by one of the most original voices in contemporary literature. Each essay takes a day as its point of inquiry, observing the body as it moves through time, architecture, and space, gradually demanding a new logic and level of consciousness from the narrator and reader. Through this sharp, dense, and utterly rewarding book, Gladman manages to achieve an impossible balance between the intellectual rigor of an academic, the linguistic sensibility of a poet, and the probing logical fantasy of a visual artist. It’s appropriate that Calamities would enact this sort of intersection of identities—that it would shift tectonically between them, shimmering all the while. A must-read for creators of all shapes, or even better those creators who shift shapes, who name i