"In his first collection of essays, beloved poet James Seay explores myriad universal themes including mental illness, what it means to be a parent and to lose a child, and the complexities of when different cultures collide, all told through his experience as a writer and a lifelong Southerner. We share moments with Seay that stay with us, dipping in and out of his life and our own collective experiences: his grandmother wringing chicken necks for Sunday dinner, Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha, 9/11, TV's The Sopranos, and the American obsession with guns. In each essay, he connects these disparate topics to the South, whether his home state or his years of teaching in Virginia and North Carolina, and he transports readers to these locales, often using Southern literature as a means of understanding culture and place. Using his poet's eye for detail, Seay offers few easy answers for the big questions he explores in this book. But walking with him on his journeys will open eyes to the possibilities, tenderness, and mysteries that surround us, hidden among everyday things"--
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The collection, published by The University of North Carolina Press, who were gracious enough to provide me with this review copy through Netgalley, consists of twenty essays of varying length about diverse topics. All these essays are birthed by the experiences of the writer, from his childhood, his multiple professions, and his interactions with people at various places that he visited and stayed in his life. The author tries to find takeaways from each of them that he feels are deserving of being shared with his readers. When we look into the past, we remember only snippets of some memories, most of them so vague that it becomes an impossibility to reconstruct them. But there may be some vivid frames that we never forget and that continue to grow inside us, making our lives richer.