Augury (Associated Writing Programs Award for Creative Nonfiction)

Fifteen essays deal with life in the southwest on either side of the Mexico-United States border and with the other borderlines in life that are not so readily apparent

WhileWhile? celebrating Mexico's Independence Day as skyrockets blaze, Garrison contemplates his relationship with his father, who recently died of cancer. Joining Huichol Indians on a peyote pilgrimage through a Mexican desert, he finds all his senses sharpened: "The spider bears a particular value, rather like that of a musical note." Winner of the Associated Writing Programs Award for Creative Nonfiction, these 15 often profound essays, set mainly in Mexico, transform a physical landscape into a mindscape of odd discoveries, haunting juxtapositions and shifting perceptual boundaries. One meditation on ritual and superstition likens Illinois folk beliefs to "a kind of communal ongoing artwork." Other essays deal with the Rio Grande as border between want and affluence; a defiant, elderly Walt Whitman; the Grand Coulee Dam; and the clash of Spanish and Aztec world views. Garrison, an English professor at Central Washington State University, is in perfect control of his medium.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This collection of 15 descriptive essays has been awarded the Associated Writing Programs Award for Creative Nonfiction. The essays are intensely personal, seeking to explore mental, familial, and geographical relationships. For the most part, they alternate between Mexico and the Pacific Northwest, covering topics that range from the death of the author's father from cancer to Missouri folk belief, Whitman, coyote, and Greek mythology. Garrison's thought and language are musical and flowing; he creates connections between sagebrush and Halicarnassus. Garrison has also published Away Awhile (Lynx House, 1986), poetry about Mexico, and is on the faculty at Central Washington State University. Recommended.
- Mary Margaret Benson, Linfield Coll. Lib., McMinnville, Ore.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.