Aligning the Glacier's Ghost - (River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize) by Sarah Capdeville (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Rooted in Western Montana, the essays of Aligning the Glacier's Ghost navigate how sense of place intertwines with sense of self, filling geographical and personal in-betweens of identity and illness, memory and story, and intimacy and solitude. This stunning and evocative debut gives shape to those distances, naming them as grief, narrative, and belonging. Capdeville begins the collection with one of many fissures of health, setting the stage for a lush braiding of metaphor, the body, and the natural world. In spanning the space between loss and being lost, Aligning the Glacier's Ghost outlines absence, the evolution of self, and Capdeville's foundation of place in trail work, travel, and early adulthood. Readers will find themselves enmeshed in Capdeville's reflections on how the seen and unseen interconnect to shape an inner world.

Review Quotes

"The essays in this gorgeous collection weave a story of geographies--emotional, linguistic, cultural, and intellectual--undergirded by a voice so compelling I could not put it down. . . . Aligning the Glacier's Ghost is a remarkable debut."--Nathasha Trethewey, author of Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir

"These gorgeous essays capture the deep beauty of wildness within and outside of us. The book is a clear-eyed, all-inclusive celebration of what blurs and bores, what freezes, aches, grieves, and soars. Capdeville embraces the whole: glaciers, meadows, rivers, fires, elk, bear, goshawks, and huckleberries. Pickups, parking lots, and operating rooms, too. In Aligning the Glacier's Ghost, all is connected and all is in motion. 'I've panned for silver linings, ' Capdeville writes, 'and found only chaos.' What magnificent chaos it is."