{"product_id":"book-of-mutter-isbn-9781584351962","title":"Book of Mutter","description":"\u003cb\u003eA fragmented, lyrical essay on memory, identity, mourning, and the mother.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cp\u003eWriting is how I attempt to repair myself, stitching back former selves, sentences. When I am brave enough I am never brave enough I unravel the tapestry of my life, my childhood.\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e—\u003c\/i\u003efrom\u003ci\u003e Book of Mutter\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eComposed over thirteen years, Kate Zambreno's \u003ci\u003eBook of Mutter\u003c\/i\u003e is a tender and disquieting meditation on the ability of writing, photography, and memory to embrace shadows while in the throes—and dead calm—of grief. \u003ci\u003eBook of Mutter\u003c\/i\u003e is both primal and sculpted, shaped by the author's searching, indexical impulse to inventory family apocrypha in the wake of her mother's death. The text spirals out into a fractured anatomy of melancholy that includes critical reflections on the likes of Roland Barthes, Louise Bourgeois, Henry Darger, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Peter Handke, and others. Zambreno has modeled the book's formless form on Bourgeois's Cells sculptures—at once channeling the volatility of autobiography, pain, and childhood, yet hemmed by a solemn sense of entering ritualistic or sacred space.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eNeither memoir, essay, nor poetry, \u003ci\u003eBook of Mutter\u003c\/i\u003e is an uncategorizable text that draws upon a repertoire of genres to write into and against silence. It is a haunted text, an accumulative archive of myth and memory that seeks its own undoing, driven by crossed desires to resurrect and exorcise the past. Zambreno weaves a complex web of associations, relics, and references, elevating the prosaic scrapbook into a strange and intimate postmortem\/postmodern theater.\u003c\/p\u003eThe composition of this book requires the reader to participate in constructing links, noticing patterns, and making meaning; it is what Barthes would call a 'writerly text,' welcoming the reader into its many entrances and possibilities. Zambreno's work is an exercise in semiotics, a study of meaning-making, for things that seem intimate, foundational, and basic to being human: history, memory, mother, mourning.—\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly, (\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003estarred review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e)\u003c\/i\u003e—\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003eAbove all, \u003ci\u003eBook of Mutter\u003c\/i\u003e is a work of tone; it expresses a failure to transcend grief, written from a place of guilt and shame, in halting and inarticulate gestures...Writing may not change anything, may not heal or even console—but, like Bourgeois's \u003ci\u003eCells\u003c\/i\u003e, it creates a space in which formlessness, pain and chaos are enclosed and held like holy relics in a church.\u003c\/p\u003e—\u003cb\u003eJenny Hendrix\u003c\/b\u003e, \u003ci\u003eTimes Literary Supplement\u003c\/i\u003e—\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe book is relentless in its search for meaning and its simultaneous refusal of simplistic acts of closure. Even its structure seems designed to reflect pain intermittently avoided and confronted. Zambreno places her memories into a kind of assemblage piece, where the form shifts with its underlying emotions.\u003c\/p\u003e—\u003cb\u003eMattilda Bernstein Sycamore\u003c\/b\u003e, \u003ci\u003eBookforum\u003c\/i\u003e—\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eBook of Mutter\u003c\/i\u003e is ultimately a self-consciously unsentimental yet deeply moving book. The distance of its aesthetic styling belies an intense vulnerability and love that emerges through a number of affecting details: her father's handwriting continuing her mother's gardening journal, memories of 'fraught yet tangy' meatloaf, a cream-colored dress with flowers that almost pains the narrator to mention. In a craft lecture reproduced in Semiotext(e)'s magazine \u003ci\u003eAnimal Shelter\u003c\/i\u003e, Zambreno writes, 'All I want is a literature both tender and grotesque.' \u003ci\u003eWith Book of Mutter\u003c\/i\u003e, she finds it.\u003c\/p\u003e—\u003cb\u003eAlexander Pines\u003c\/b\u003e, \u003ci\u003eBomb Magazine\u003c\/i\u003e—\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003eAmong its many concerns—the death of her mother, grief, autobiography, photography, memory—are the conventions of book-making itself: It seems as invested in unforming itself as it is in forming itself, and the result exists outside of any of the familiar expectations of genre.\u003c\/p\u003e—\u003cb\u003eT. Clutch Fleischmann\u003c\/b\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Brooklyn Rail\u003c\/i\u003e—\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe slim book of bristling fragments is heavy but moves swiftly, as if laid down in one long fever dream.\u003c\/p\u003e—\u003cb\u003eNate Lippens\u003c\/b\u003e, \u003ci\u003eQueen Mob's Tea House\u003c\/i\u003e—\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003eAs with all her books, Zambreno's sharp and stylish intellectual masonry, her careful gathering of evidence, is a kind of (intentionally) incomplete catharsis. She collects anecdotes like novelist David Markson, but unlike him—he of the impersonal (and emotionally devastating) story—she builds an altar to her own past, these anecdotes both personal and yes, sometimes political.\u003c\/p\u003e—\u003cb\u003eAmber Sparks\u003c\/b\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Fanzine\u003c\/i\u003e—\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003eBarthes, Handke, Louise Bourgeois join the chorus of citations scattered like waymarks through this mournful, fragmentary text, which dwells around, without answering – as though the attempt were the only answer possible—the question, which in the text is posed without a question mark: 'What does it mean to write what is not there. To write an absence.'\u003c\/p\u003e—\u003cb\u003eAdrian Nathan West\u003c\/b\u003e, \u003ci\u003eReview 31\u003c\/i\u003e—\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eMutter\u003c\/i\u003e is unapologetically intellectual, and unapologetically bodily. But while this reader enjoys an intertextual puzzle as much as the next, I found the most compelling threads within \u003ci\u003eMutter\u003c\/i\u003e were those bearing witness to the ordinary; sites of lament and also startling beauty.\u003c\/p\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe Lifted Brow\u003c\/i\u003e—\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003eKate Zambreno's \u003ci\u003eBook of Mutter\u003c\/i\u003e is an elegy, an archive, a palimpsest of fragmented memory...It's as if the book's language has broken with the weight of sorrow.\u003c\/p\u003e—\u003cb\u003eAnne Yoder\u003c\/b\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Millions\u003c\/i\u003e—\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe distance of its aesthetic styling belies an intense vulnerability and love that emerges through a number of affecting details: her father's handwriting continuing her mother's gardening journal, memories of 'fraught yet tangy' meatloaf, a cream-colored dress with flowers that almost pains the narrator to mention.\u003c\/p\u003e—\u003cb\u003eClaire Marie Healy\u003c\/b\u003e, \u003ci\u003eAnother Magazine\u003c\/i\u003e—Kate Zambreno is the author of the novels \u003ci\u003eGreen Girl \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eO Fallen Angel\u003c\/i\u003e as well as the nonfiction \u003ci\u003eHeroines\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eBook of Mutter\u003c\/i\u003e (both published by Semiotexte(e)).","brand":"Semiotext(e)","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46300078735589,"sku":"NP9781584351962","price":17.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781584351962.jpg?v=1767722939","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/book-of-mutter-isbn-9781584351962","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}