Hive-Mind - Softcover

Myers, Gabrielle

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0976498693 ISBN 13: 9780976498698

Publisher: Lisa Hagan Books, 2015

Synopsis

Evoking the lyrical precision of Annie Dillard and the exquisite food writing of M.F.K. Fisher, Gabrielle Myers takes us on a Northern California idyll through her 2006 internship at the Tip Top Farm and Produce in Vacaville. Here, the beauty of the land - light streaming through fig branches, carnelian tomatoes exploding in front of rows of sweet peas - is tended by the mysterious frenetic Farmer and her interns, Baker and Chef. Their days are filled with back-breaking farm labor, but their nights are alive with the freshest, most creative meals imaginable. At night, Gabi lies in her yurt pondering her mother's suicide attempt, working on stories to tell herself to make it all right, while just up the hill another mind, busy as a hive, fights a storm of loss and sorrow that threatens to shatter Eden. And what of these stories do we tell ourselves? Myers asks. Sometimes, they can't be rewritten.

About this title

About the Author:

Gabrielle, an Associate Professor of English at San Joaquin Delta College, went to graduate school in her early thirties to earn an M.A. in English from the University of California at Davis and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Saint Mary’s College of California. Her poems and essays have been published in professional journals and literary magazines. She coauthored a nutrition book, The New Prostate Cancer Nutrition Book. Access links to her poems, essays, and recipe blog through her website: http://www.gabriellemyers.com

Review:

"In powerful lyric prose that sometimes can't help give way to poetry...Gabrielle Myers sings her own, very personal love song to the soil under all of our feet. The voice in Hive-Mind is complicated, edgy, vulnerable and deeply in love with fig trees, cherry tomatoes, and the sound of crickets on a hundred and ten degree summer day.  In these dark, environmentally catastrophic times, we need books like this one to shake us out of our slumber, remind us where we came from, reconnect us to what we are."     
 
-Pam Houston, Author Contents May Have Shifted

"It's gorgeous. The writing is so precise and riveting that you can't tear yourself away from any moment. Myers is a writer of elegance and heart, and also of extraordinary intelligence. I'm not quite sure how you create this hardhearted and yet spiritually elevated work; but she has somehow managed it. It's a remarkable experience to read this book. So please do."

-Wesley Gibson, author of Personal Saviors

"... I know I will return to this intimate examination of experience, which offers insightful, hard-earned revelation. As one reads this text, what begins implicitly, suggestively teased forth by Myers' deftly honed articulation of event, will be a strongly intensifying respect for how individuals come to understand each other, and how we come to understand some of the great challenges of our human condition, in all our unique particularity."

-Rusty Morrison, publisher of Omnidawn Books, and author of
Beyond the Chainlink

"In a daring mix of poetry and prose, Gabrielle Myers explores desire and rot,
walking close to the plum blossom's open mouth. I admire this book completely."

-Marilyn Abildskov author of
The Men In My Country

About this edition

• Publisher: Lisa Hagan Books
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0976498693
• ISBN 13: 9780976498698
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 312