Intimate: An American Family Photo Album (Tupelo Press Lineage) - Hardcover

Rekdal, Paisley

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1936797089 ISBN 13: 9781936797080

Publisher: Tupelo Press, 2012

Synopsis

Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. Asian American Studies. Native American Studies. INTIMATE is a hybrid memoir and "photo album" that blends personal essay, historical documentary, and poetry to examine the tense relationship between self, society, and familial legacy in contemporary America. Typographically innovative, INTIMATE creates parallel streams, narrating the stories of Rekdal's Norwegian-American father and his mixed-race marriage, the photographer Edward S. Curtis, and Curtis's murdered Apsaroke guide, Alexander Upshaw. The result is panoramic, a completely original literary encounter with intimacy, identity, family relations, and race.

About this title

About the Author:

Paisley Rekdal is the author of a book of essays, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee (Pantheon, 2000; Vintage, 2002), and three books of poetry. Her work has received a Village Voice Writers on the Verge Award, a Fulbright Fellowship, and the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship. Her poems and essays have been featured in The New York Times Magazine, NPR, and Nerve, and in many literary journals. She teaches at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.

Review:

"In this daring lyric fusion of memoir and fictive biography, history and cultural commentary, Paisley Rekdal illuminates the dangerous slippage between transgression and reverence. Identity is forever unfixed by desire. The lush sensuality of her language, lit by dazzling evocations of the Edward Curtis photographs, lure the reader/viewer/voyeur into the borderlands where tempting lies and mythic images entice us to believe these haunting dreams might still be real. For Rekdal, the shimmering gold-tone photographs frosted and fissured by light become a mirror and a window. Through her tender, imaginative, fiercely honest gaze, she exposes the man behind the camera, the beauty of his subjects, the mysterious devotion of his Apsaroke guide, and the eerie resonance all these figures share with her own remarkable life as the daughter of a Chinese mother and Norwegian father." -- Melanie Rae Thon

"Intimate's refusal of easy classification ... insists that we reconsider not only who shapes American history but how we shape American identity.... [N]ot only a smart and nuanced book but one that is generous and compassionate." -- Victoria Redel --Advance Praise

About this edition

• Publisher: Tupelo Press
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1936797089
• ISBN 13: 9781936797080
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 300