Out of Nowhere Into Nothing

Where ghosts speak and memory listens, nothing becomes everything

The ghosts―literal and figurative―that drive our deepest impulses, disturb our most precious memories, and haunt the passages of our daily lives are present in this collection of sublime meditations on the unbelievable, the coincidental, and the apparitional. Often containing reflections on the art of storytelling, Caryl Pagel’s essays blend memoir, research, and reflection, and are driven by a desire to observe connections between the visual and the invisible. The narrator of Pagel’s essays explores each enigma or encounter (a football coach’s faked death, the faces of women walking, historical accounts of hallucinations, a city’s public celebration gone wrong) as an intellectual detective ascending a labyrinthine tower of clues in pursuit of a solution to an unreachable problem: always curious, and with a sense of profound wonder.

Out of Nowhere Into Nothing is a sprawling, highly associative consideration of the ways in which the observed material world recalls us to larger narrative and aesthetic truths. Interspersed with documentary-style photographs, Pagel’s first collection of prose is a radiant, obsessive investigation into the mysteries at the center of our seemingly mundane lives.
 

Caryl Pagel is associate professor at Cleveland State University, where she teaches poetry and nonfiction in the NEOMFA program. She is author of two collections of poetry, Twice Told and Experiments I Should Like Tried At My Own Death. Pagel is cofounder and editor at Rescue Press and director of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center.