The Names of Things
Susan Brind Morrow's lyric prose wades the deep waters of life, death, and the meanings of words. Her narrative evokes the smell of raw, wet earth from her Finger Lakes childhood, the red rock of the Egyptian desert she travels, dead Greek words she studied "like shards of some wonderful glass," and fluid Arabic where "a name is a mirror to catch the soul of a thing, and a pun is the corner of its garment." Seeking desert solace for her siblings' deaths, Brind adventures through Egypt's Red Sea Hills and Sudan's wadis, studying the birth of language amid its natural, living origins.