Swerve
by Laurie Blauner

“Today is yesterday with its hands over its eyes,” says Laurie Blauner in her second nonfiction book, titled Swerve, which is comprised of twenty one lyrical, hybrid essays. Topics include crooked teeth, imagination, stealing, art, drinking, luck, surveillance, husbands, mannequins, ghosts, mothers, noise, sleep, nature, and animals and our relationships with them. Using poetic prose that includes stories, poetry, lists, and vignettes, she discusses distractions and inconveniences, time, our human foibles, as well as what to avoid and what to run toward. She asks, “Are we all capable of going wild?” and “Are we our own mysteries?” The book is a warning and a celebration. She observes, “This world, too, is becoming an argument.” With surprising language Blauner presents perspectives on the world that intersect with what sustains it. These are the interrelationships of animals, plants, and people that live within this world. The book is mainly memoir although it includes various points of view, like a scarf in a souvenir store, a raccoon, a mannequin, imagination, and a pebble. Funny and strange, these essays can be read separately although the themes connect throughout. The future is a concern and the consequence of any taken action. Laurie Blauner claims as she swerves towards and away from everything, “I was wilder but now I’m tame.” Is she?

What is between the real, felt, and imagined illuminates Laurie Blauner’s insightful hybrid essays. These pieces are alive with unexpected transformations. Both amusing and profound, these essays reveal truths about ourselves and our world. Courageous and stunning, Swerve shows us what we must leave in order to get us closer to what we want.

—Rich Ives, author of A Servant’s Map of the Body and RatBoy and Other Stories

Imagine a place of pure invention, glorious and effulgent, combined with a voice spoken from privacy and the memoirist episodes of a life: hers, ours, the lives of animals and trees―this is Laurie Blauner soaring in her new book of lyric essays, Swerve. Always a writer of matchless ingenuity, Blauner’s spiraling perspective in these twenty-one essays becomes an inquiry into what it is to be human. Are you made of clouds or breath? Do you feel fire? Ice? I am a scarecrow left in a field wearing someone else’s dress. Like the word swerve itself, the book has many points of departure and return: murmurations, mannequins and their misadventures, wildlife (accidental and otherwise), kaleidoscopes and souvenirs, the ruined. Deeply perceptive and perfectly crafted, these are elevated pieces. The mood is alternately one of lightness, one of pathos. She unscrews one of her hands as if that gesture proves her sensory deprivation. Then she fastens it back again. I’m going on a journey. With webs of language, idea, and form, Blauner casts a spell. Mesmerizing and masterful. Irresistible to dwell in this space.

—Rosalind Palermo Stevenson, author of Soul, Ghost, My Absolute and The Absent

Read an excerpt from Swerve

COMING SOON