Moth; or how I came to be with you again - Softcover

Heise, Thomas

Softcover

ISBN 10: 193674757X ISBN 13: 9781936747573

Publisher: Sarabande Books, 2013

Synopsis

Thomas Heise's adventurous Moth; or how I came to be with you again is a densely lyrical poetic narrative. The story follows the narrator’s real and imagined journeys through time and space in search of his unknown mother, in flight from his unknown father, and in pursuit of his lost love. Traveling through his past, and across several cities in Europe in the present, he ruminates on the hypnotic rhythm of train travel, insomnia, desire, the nature of memory, and modern art. Moth recalls W.G. Sebald, Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, and especially Antonioni's films, where viewers experience a mysterious sense of washed-out beauty and trouble. Heise's language is precise and his lush, unfolding sentences offer a great, gorgeous pleasure. Moth is a haunting, one-of-a-kind novel that will stay with the reader for a long, long time.

About this title

About the Author:

Thomas Heise is the author of Horror Vacui: Poems (Sarabande, 2006) and Urban Underworlds: A Geography of Twentieth-Century American Literature and Culture (Rutgers University Press, 2010). He is an Associate Professor of English at McGill University and divides his time between Montreal and New York City.

Review:

"Neither memoir, poem, nor novel, Moth is somehow all three―an effusive ramble through the space of language and the language of memory. Written during a period of intensely disorienting insomnia, Heise’s “autobiography of fever” recalls the orphanage of the author’s childhood, an affair he had with a psychiatrist, and a peripatetic adulthood.... Heise seems capable of doing anything with words, and this book is a diagram of life’s “internal chambers” that ventures into bleary territory hitherto thought unspeakable."
--Publishers Weekly

"With Moth; or how I came to be with you again, Thomas Heise has written a deeply moving account of loss, migration, and memory that blurs the line between poetry and prose.... Subtle turns of wit temper the book's melancholy with understated, ambivalent humor. This combination is one of Moth's many treasures."
--Montreal Review of Books

"It's impossible to convey in a few lines the enormous pleasures of this book–the beauty of the design, the incandescent prose, its rigor and intelligence. A deeply melancholic and moving work of art."
–-Carole Maso

"Thomas Heise's Moth; or how I came to be with you again is a machine of occluded and crystalline memory, performing permutations of the highest order―loss, losing, lust, lost. The book’s calculating engine searches and searches through its fine-toothed gears for the infinite solution to be derived when one divides one by zero. The silence between the words, between the pages is terrific."
--Michael Martone

"Neither memoir, poem, nor novel, Moth is somehow all three an effusive ramble through the space of language and the language of memory. Written during a period of intensely disorienting insomnia, Heise’s autobiography of fever” recalls the orphanage of the author’s childhood, an affair he had with a psychiatrist, and a peripatetic adulthood.... Heise seems capable of doing anything with words, and this book is a diagram of life’s internal chambers” that ventures into bleary territory hitherto thought unspeakable."
--Publishers Weekly

"With Moth; or how I came to be with you again, Thomas Heise has written a deeply moving account of loss, migration, and memory that blurs the line between poetry and prose.... Subtle turns of wit temper the book's melancholy with understated, ambivalent humor. This combination is one of Moth's many treasures."
--Montreal Review of Books

"It's impossible to convey in a few lines the enormous pleasures of this book the beauty of the design, the incandescent prose, its rigor and intelligence. A deeply melancholic and moving work of art."
-Carole Maso

"Thomas Heise's Moth; or how I came to be with you again is a machine of occluded and crystalline memory, performing permutations of the highest order loss, losing, lust, lost. The book’s calculating engine searches and searches through its fine-toothed gears for the infinite solution to be derived when one divides one by zero. The silence between the words, between the pages is terrific."
--Michael Martone

About this edition

• Publisher: Sarabande Books
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 193674757X
• ISBN 13: 9781936747573
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 192