Karen Green: Bough Down
Grief emphatic, grief redeeming, grief protacted, grief abraded all intertwine in this funny, prickly memoir. (David DenbyThe New Yorker2013-08-26)"KAREN GREEN'S NEW - and incredibly, her first - book Bough Down, from Siglio Press, is an astonishment. It is one of the most moving, strange, original, harrowing, and beautiful documents of grief and reckoning I've read. The book consists of a series of prose poems, or individuated chunks of poetic prose, interspersed with postage-stamp-sized collages made by Green, who is also a visual artist. Collectively the text bears witness to the 2008 suicide of her husband, the writer David Foster Wallace, and its harrowing aftermath for Green. " (Maggie NelsonLos Angeles Review of Books2013-05-02)The book hints at healing, but with such stream-of-consciousness prose and a traumatic subject, closure may be too much to hope for: Green's last words on the subject are an abrupt: "I can't wrap this up." (Publisher's Weekly EditorsPublisher's Weekly2013-03-25)To those who have lived through such a loss, this punishingly tender elegy may have totemic power, but to every reader Green's empathy, her humor, and her observations-so clear they are nearly hallucinatory-are strong medicine. (Andi MuddThe Believer2013-03-21)This exquisite book is an impressionistic miracle, an assemblage of short text fragments and collages by an artist trying to make sense of her husband's suicide. That this husband was David Foster Wallace is beautifully beside the point, for the focus here is on the experience, the bleak and necessary journey of grief. Green is a pointed writer, open and at a distance all at once. The effect is unsettling, elliptical, necessarily open-ended and at times brutally revealing: a necessary explication of loss as a fact of daily life. (David UlinsLos Angeles Times2013-03-06)