Awkward: A Detour

In Awkward: A Detour, Mary Cappello investigates all that is not smooth, facile, and fluent. The role of awkwardness in the work and lives of artists, including Emily Dickinson, is one component of what Newswise Arts and Humanities calls “a literary hybrid: part memoir, part cultural criticism, part philosophical meditation”.

One would expect the biography of Emily Dickinson, often represented as a recluse, to be characterized by awkwardness (though I think you’ll find her much sharper and less awkward than the simple version would have). But I think it’s in her poetry that awkwardness is used to great effect; we’ve seen this already in one of her poems, where the joyfulness of a wreck-and-rescue story turns awkward in its retelling:

Then a silence suffuses the story,
And a softness the teller’s eye;
And the children no further question,
And only the waves reply.

And we shall see many more ways in which Dickinson uses humor and irony to make things uncomfortable.

“Awkward: A Detour” gets a brief review in the Los Angeles Times; you can read an excerpt at the University of Utah humanities web site. It’s published by Bellevue Literary Press, an offshoot of the Bellevue Literary Review, put out under the auspices of Bellevue Hospital. (If you haven’t yet picked up a copy of Bellevue Literary Review, I highly recommend that you do: it’s one of the smartest journals of fiction, poetry, and essay out there, and that it comes from the medical world makes it that much more fascinating.)

The book’s site (with information about the author) is here.

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