Description
A love song in three movements, As If Fire Could Hide Us explores the expansiveness of consciousness and compassion through and beyond the human body.
A twelve-year-old girl slips out a basement window, steals a bike, and sets off on a perilous adventure. Injured and slowly bleeding out, Orelia enters a vast, spectacularly animate environment where she senses the limits of self disintegrating, her being entangled with the forest.
A prison guard and member of the strap down team witnesses a painfully prolonged execution and is delivered to a heart-cracking sense of identification with the ones he's killed. Every grieving mother is his own. Any man might be himself, his closest friend, his brother.
An organ donor's body is restored and resurrected through the bodies of multitudes. Spiritually and physically, one human being becomes many. Everything in the cosmos is intertwined and interchangeable. Embracing this awareness may bring fear or euphoria-desolation, peace, despair, rapture.
About the Author
Melanie Rae Thon is a recipient of a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, and a Lannan Foundation Writers Residency. She is the composer of thirteen works of fiction and poetry.
Reviews
"As If Fire Could Hide Us asks its readers: What responsibility do we have to each other when, whether by accident or design, we commit great harm? Can we love strangers with the same depth as we love our family members and ourselves? And if so, what risks attend that love? As If Fire Could Hide Us is a work of great and radical empathy, a work of moral philosophy, a work of love."-Paisley Rekdal, author of Nightingale and Intimate: An American Family Photo Album
Book Information
ISBN 9781573662000
Author Melanie Rae Thon
Format Paperback
Page Count 206
Imprint Fiction Collective Two
Publisher The University of Alabama Press
Weight(grams) 272g