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The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

When love, lust, and longing, have all but killed you, and Newtonian physics has become too painfully restrictive, is it possible to find freedom in another dimension? Have you lost the will to live, or the will to live as human? Castaways in unmapped terrain, the characters in The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far burrow underground in tunnels made by ancient nautiluses. They lay eggs by the seashore, and greet the sailors who come to carry those eggs away. And each by each, they choose to live—but to surrender their human forms. From within their peculiar neither-here-nor-there-doms, they learn to live in unbounded states, with edges that can no longer be marked, and meanings that can no longer be defined.

Quintan Ana Wikswo is a writer and visual artist recognized for adventurous works that integrate her fiction, poetry, memoir, and essay with her photographs, performances, and films. Her works are published, performed, and exhibited throughout the world, including anthologies, artist books, magazines such as Tin House, Guernica, Conjunctions, the Kenyon Review, and Gulf Coast, and in multiple solo museum exhibitions in New York City and Berlin. A human rights worker for two decades, she now uses salvaged government typewriters and cameras to navigate known, unknown, and occluded worlds, especially obscured sites where crimes against humanity have taken place. She lives in Brooklyn.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      July 20, 2015
      In these stories, author and visual artist Wikswo's juxtaposes dreamy, surreal prose with shadowed, ambiguous, occluded dreamscapes to haunting effect. Her stories defy narrative and instead read like a series of short poems or incantationsâheady, euphoric, and full with loss. Her characters are starkly embodied but unanchored to the merciless landscapes they inhabitâfrom the frozen to the flooded, to prisons literal and metaphorical (their danger evoked by smoky forests superimposed on decaying buildings). In "The Cartographer's Khorovod," a prisoner of war laments the woman he chose to leave behind; in "My Nebulae, My Antilles," a tourist receives letters she wrote to herself with all the rapturous intensity of a lover. Nautical imagery, the cartography of the body, and the Baltic Sea recur in a cosmology of wonder and the unknown that unites these stories, where a woman can carry her mother in a jar ("The Delicate Architecture of Our Galaxy"), dead pilots visit the women they loved ("The Kholodnaya Voyna Club"), and a woman seeks her beloved in a nautilus shell buried deep beneath the ground ("The Double Nautilus"). Wikswo's singular lines strike like the tone of a bell, resonating across pages, while her beautifully composed images echo the surprising twists of language: ghosts "more trout than human," a shadow that resembles a "camel. A monkey puzzle tree. A quail." The stories defy genre or distillation and instead take the reader on a journey where myth, mystery, and the impossible have never seemed more real. Photos.

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  • English

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