A Solar Flare - by Candace R Nunag (Paperback)

About the Book

Candace R. Nunag's A Solar Flare blends essays, poems, flash fiction, graphite rubbings, and instant photographs to explore the 1859 Carrington Event--the most powerful solar flare in recorded history. Through fragmented forms and lyrical inquiry, the book traces the narrator's severed connections across digital, supernatural, and analog realms, illuminating the tangled pathways of grief, identity, and remembrance.

Book Synopsis

A hybrid of short works exploring the 1859 Carrington solar flare

A flood of illumination, a cosmic cataclysm frozen in time--the Carrington Event of 1859 was the most disruptive solar flare in recorded history, an electromagnetic storm that wiped out telegraph systems across the world and which, if it were to occur today, might well destroy anything on the planet with an electrical circuit.

Candace Nunag's A Solar Flare is a hybrid of short essays, research notes, poems, graphite rubbings, and instant photographs, as well as bits of flash fiction, all simultaneously contemplating technology and memory, while preoccupied with the 1859 solar flare. The ghost of the Carrington Event haunts A Solar Flare with the promise of definitive answers about the narrator's many severed connections: her digital, supernatural, eastern, western, and analog past. It is an attempt to illuminate the path of thought, wending its way through the tangles of rumination and irreconcilable spaces of wonder.

Review Quotes

"In this completely original, deeply moving, and sharply intelligent book, Candace Nunag asks us to consider the afterlife of media, the technology of memorialization, and the impossibility of resolving grief in a voice both raw and wry, both vulnerable and whip smart." --Julie Carr, author of Underscore

"A Solar Flare is a kind of commonplace book, a well of collected knowledge, that unlike internet search engines and social media algorithms curbs rather than fuels 'prosumerism.' Its white space and sparsity is an invitation to pause and observe, memory receding like a wave, or the petals of a lotus opening one at a time." --Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint, author of Names for Light

About the Author

Candace R. Nunag holds an MFA from the University of Colorado Boulder. She is a literary prose writer whose work is centered on biracial subjectivity and identity; specifically, her work engages with multicultural practices of grief and mourning while also exploring topics like technology, addiction, suicide, and survivorship.