Description
Reviews
An ambitious collage attempting to place the reader within an imagined consciousness-typically the provenance of prose literature. -- Ryan Chapman * The Believer *
integrate[s] a nuanced literary voice, a rigorous visual aesthetic, and an entire life story into a masterwork. -- Ryan Chapman * The Believer *
Frail Sister is not simply a graphic narrative made up of a compelling art form - it is a song, a dirge, a mystery, and a tragic lark. -- Elaine Sexton * On the Seawall *
[Green] is honoring the lives of so many other lost and forgotten women. -- Elissa Schappell * Tin House *
Those artifacts are both found and made-we readers mostly don't know which-and are all over each other in every manner of letter, photograph, clipping, drawing, and diagram, making the book like a biographical archive ordered by chronology and collaged into lucid disorder. -- Adam Plunkett * Art in America *
What a beautiful, strange book -- found objects and fictional prose brought together to tell the real and imagined story of Constance Gale, through letters to her sister, letters from young men at war. From the beginning to the end of the book, we bear witness to a life, too-short but fully-lived. This is simply fascinating and gorgeously written, gorgeously assembled. -- Roxane Gay * Goodreads/Twitter *
Glorious, a haunting prism of art and artifact, Frail Sister builds its power as a mystery does, with clues and secrets, the story inseparable from the form. Moving, sly and skillful, a portrait of woman's life in the embodied history of its materials. A marvel. -- Janet Fitch
Karen Green smashes the boundaries between the visual and the written, the found and the invented, the comic and the tragic; between uncompromising art and pure fun. Her ear is as keen as her eye is dazzling. And her obsessions are contagious. -- Jonathan Franzen
Frail Sister is a singular achievement that defies genre naming. Here image is formed by epistolary text which is informed by the unformed facts of actual lives reformed by fiction. Sisters in life and the men who admire, cajole or destroy them stand in for every woman who has felt missing, gone missing, found dead. If there must be a question at the center of every breath, Frail Sister asks what it is to "faint upwards" or "float and fall" in the same moment. This is a masterwork creating its own terms for existence-every page a marvelous and terrifying journey. -- Claudia Rankine
Book Information
ISBN 9781938221194
Author Karen Green
Format Hardback
Page Count 168
Imprint Siglio Press
Publisher Siglio Press