A Thousand Voices - Hardcover

Jeri Parker

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0983629404 ISBN 13: 9780983629405

Publisher: Winter Beach Press, 2011

Synopsis

A memoir of the remarkable relationship between a young, single woman and the wild, beautiful deaf boy who, for a time, took the place of the son she'd lost, A Thousand Voices is a song of love and grief and a profound meditation on the limits—and the limitlessness—of language.

Jeri Parker first met Carlos Louis Salazar in 1964, when she was a high school teacher in Ogden, Utah and he was her friend Marianne Bentley's student at the Utah School for the Deaf. Ten years old but “more otherworldly than childlike,” Carlos wore his beauty like a gift to the world, but occasionally—and regularly when adolescence went through him like a fire—he ripped at it with something like disdain. If Carlos could charm anyone, there was danger in him too. He fathered and had to give up a child when he was still a teenager; he became loud and rude and “unmistakably mean”; he fought, he stole; he got involved with drugs. But when, still in his twenties, his kidneys failed and his life turned into an endless series of operations, he shone as he never had before. Strung with tubes and bed-bound, his struggling body borne down with the shadow of foreign masses, he soared—and carried those who were lucky enough to know him with him.

About this title

From the Author:

The most interesting question I've been asked in the readings I've given of A Thousand Voices is "When did you know this deaf boy, Carlos, trusted you?" The question touched me. It was perceptive, taking me as well as those in attendance, to a deeper level of the book. I was moved because I knew Carlos had trusted me, but as I stood there, I realized I had honored that trust. And the moment of knowing of his trust. It was when he boarded a plane in his hometown of Ogden, Utah and flew two thousand miles alone to where I was in Montreal. He was very young and slight, he couldn't easily be understood, and he was traveling alone. And he needed to leave behind some trouble he'd had. A big identifying halter had been put on him and when I saw him step off that plane with his name strapped across the front of him, vulnerable yet confident in me, I knew we'd be friends for the rest of our lives.

From the Inside Flap:

"Again I was still, watching in my mind the ancient human struggle of a boy coming to understand himself, and to move beyond his limitations. It was all against the odds for Carlos, yet triumph is the word that most comes to mind in thinking about his life. Without having heard language, he was a phrasemaker. Without having had an advanced education, he became sophisticated in the most wonderful sense of the word. Without having had health, he lived fully and deeply. Without having had a merciful life, he was compassionate. Without having  money, he brought riches. With so much to endure, he did endure."

About this edition

• Publisher: Winter Beach Press
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0983629404
• ISBN 13: 9780983629405
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 211