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How to Keep You Alive
“Time poured off into a glass. The juice poured and I wrote it down, to be wild but seen as ordered.”
How does one stay alive? This book asks the impossible question of how one maintains a separation between past and present, memory from self, and inheritance from present body. As objects and gestures from various chronologies collapse and conflate, as in dreams, one might then ask, what do our dreams tell us about our lives? Blurring the boundaries of fiction and nonfiction in a way that mirrors the attempt to capture what it is like to survive and to persist, How to Keep You Alive absorbs and sees the world through a lens of violence and trauma while struggling to maintain a present life in a body that continues to resist, to touch, to create rituals, to see, and to render the unseeable visually brilliant so the unsayable becomes a prayer. This book is that prayer.
How does one stay alive? This book asks the impossible question of how one maintains a separation between past and present, memory from self, and inheritance from present body. As objects and gestures from various chronologies collapse and conflate, as in dreams, one might then ask, what do our dreams tell us about our lives? Blurring the boundaries of fiction and nonfiction in a way that mirrors the attempt to capture what it is like to survive and to persist, How to Keep You Alive absorbs and sees the world through a lens of violence and trauma while struggling to maintain a present life in a body that continues to resist, to touch, to create rituals, to see, and to render the unseeable visually brilliant so the unsayable becomes a prayer. This book is that prayer.
- GenresPoetryNonfiction
120 pages, Paperback
Published September 18, 2017
About the author
Ella Longpre
3 books19 followersElla is a writer, musician, and DJ who lives in Denver, CO. She is the author of How to Keep You Alive (Civil Coping Mechanisms Press 2017), as well as three chapbooks of image + poetry + essay. She is currently earning her PhD at DU and has an MFA from the Jack Kerouac School at Naropa University. author site: http://ellalongpre.tumblr.com/ | twitter: @symbolstatus
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 22, 2022
This book is an immersive experience in the mind and heart that is experiencing, escaping, and breaking cycles of generational trauma. Written in incredible genre-defying prose, the reader must unlearn their own concepts of Ruin, Identity, and Memory to make space for this journey as they root for the author’s survival.
October 22, 2017
Whatever the opposite of "brutal honesty" is, (humane honesty, compassionate honesty, merciful honesty?)...this is a book that seems to do the impossible--unwind a trauma narrative without re-inscribing brutality. I felt as close to being a witness as I've ever felt before in the act of reading.
March 12, 2018
This book is amazing. Definitely challenging, it’s wondrous to follow along and just try to keep up. Everything moves and is so fluid and new. Beautiful.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews