About this item
Highlights
- "The Book of Kin is an expansive experience . . . beautiful, brave, and inventive.
- About the Author: Jennifer Eli Bowen is a writer, arts instructor, and editor.
- 264 Pages
- Biography + Autobiography, Personal Memoirs
Description
About the Book
"An urgent debut essay collection examining the effects of abandonment, imprisonment, and care, and how the power of love connects us all"-- Provided by publisher.Book Synopsis
"The Book of Kin is an expansive experience . . . beautiful, brave, and inventive."--Hanif Abdurraquib
A remarkable debut that explores the imperfect ways we care for one another, and how we seek repair when care fails.
"What's our obligation to each other?" asks Jennifer Eli Bowen in this propulsive exploration of community, solitude, and love. Drawing on her experiences as a mother, daughter, and founder of the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, the country's largest and most enduring prison-based literary organization, she examines the wild spectrum of shapes that care can take. She investigates the role of community across the world and in her own neighborhood, driven by a curiosity to uncover what might be gleaned from various vanishments in her own life: the shadow of her father, disappeared backyard chickens, a Moleskine notebook that passes in and out of her Little Free Library.
Tracing both connection and its lack, Bowen uncovers what happens when it's missing, how we find it, and how it heals individuals, communities, and systems--from the incarcerated caretakers of newborn foals in Norway to the time-bending drama of watching children grow into adults. And through this winding quest to understand love, she moves readers out of their complacency not only about the state of American incarceration, but about what we owe ourselves and society.
Unflinching, vulnerable, and surprisingly funny, The Book of Kin encourages us not to abandon each other, reminding us that "harm is shared, and healing is too."
Review Quotes
"The Book of Kin is an expansive experience, one that, I believe, will be appreciated for its searing and always-seeking approach to tackling large emotions, to wring the secondary colors out of the grander, primary feelings. This book is beautiful, brave, and inventive."--Hanif Abdurraquib, author of There's Always This Year
"Jennifer Eli Bowen invites us to consider what it means to care about others--and to be cared for in return. The Book of Kin is a must-read for anyone asking how we can best find community with those around us, from our families to those imprisoned half a world away."--Laura Leigh Morris, author of The Stone Catchers
About the Author
Jennifer Eli Bowen is a writer, arts instructor, and editor. Her work has received a Pushcart Prize, The Arts and Letters Prize, and the Tim McGinnis Award, and her writing has appeared in The Sun magazine, The Iowa Review, Orion, and Kenyon Review. The founder of the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, she lives in St. Paul, a block in any direction from sidewalk poetry and snow.