Rubble Masonry - by Rose McLarney (Paperback)

About the Book

"Diverse content and innovative form construct a book that explores the place in which the author finds herself as a woman from the mountain South--in history, national dialogues, public spaces, the natural world, and lineages that extend beyond an individual's life on earth. The book offers a nuanced perspective on the complexity of Appalachia and other southern regions. Stones and geology provide the bedrock on which this wide-ranging collection stands, with gravestones, monuments, erosion, and the marks we may leave or fail to make as unifying themes. The essays' subjects and sources include vernacular architecture and the endangered Cherokee language, the land lotteries that redistributed Native lands and orphanage records, past gynecological practices and soil left infertile by plantation agriculture, the reintroduction of elk and the reemergence of a river from under the Atlanta airport, and more. Connections, both conceptual and emotional, are created by the prose's braided and leaping structures and the personal narratives that McLarney shares, such as old family stories about her grandfather's career as an undertaker and forward-looking reflections on her experience of forming a transracial family as an adoptive mother. Written with a poet's attention to music and image, Rubble Masonry interleaves flash essays alongside extended meditations that critique assumed truths and confront mortality. McLarney's new collection provides further proof of the "life-affirming and refreshing" writing that Publishers Weekly celebrated for finding "beauty in simplicity and experience.""-- Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

Rubble Masonry is a collection of lyric essays that takes its title from the practice of stone masons who, rather than using materials cut to ideal measurements, work with found rocks' natural shapes. It combines the rich images and musical language of poetry with prose's capacity to share personal narratives and information from wide-ranging sources. Diverse content and innovative form distinguish a book that explores the places in which its author, Rose McLarney, finds herself as a woman from the mountain South--in history, national dialogues, public spaces, the natural world, and lineages that extend beyond an individual's life on earth.

Review Quotes

"What emerges is one of the most precise and tender meditations on place, ancestry, womanhood, and inheritance in recent American nonfiction--a work that does not rebuild the house but teaches us how to inhabit what remains."--North American Review

"Reading Rubble Masonry, I was inundated by new possibility. I relearned, loving the new possibilities for the lyric 'I, ' just as, like McLarney, I wondered, 'What can I come closer to calling mine?' A spellbinding read; I am full of praise."--Sally Keith, author of Two of Everything

"These compact and lyrical essays could have been written by no one save Rose McLarney. Her training in poetry--a pitch-perfect ear and metaphoric virtuosity--serves her investigation of expansive and braided topics in an original and fascinating book."--Beth Ann Fennelly, author of Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs

"This collection of startling, deeply original linked essays, with their lush, specific imagery and high-flying associative leaps, provides a meditation on the past in an attempt to understand the bewildering present. Rubble Masonry provides a space for contemplation--and, ultimately, for renewal."--Charlotte Pence, author of Code

"What a set list of musings in Rubble Masonry, with its peerless nuance and quirks! Peep the terrain of McLarney's wide and mighty curiosity. Rubble Masonry is impressively splendid."--Rodney Terich Leonard, author of Sweetgum & Lightning

About the Author

Rose McLarney's collections of poems are Colorfast, Forage, Its Day Being Gone, and The Always Broken Plates of Mountains. She is coeditor of A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia and the Southern Humanities Review. McLarney is Lanier Endowed Professor of Creative Writing at Auburn University.