The Collected Graces - by Jackie Wang (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

In this collection of lyric essays, Jackie Wang, sets out to articulate the illusory experience of grace--its mysterious arrivals and hasty departures.

In The Collected Graces, ghosts and rats become dirty vehicles for the articulation of divinity, as music, cinema, and an abiding bibliophilia provide Wang consistent points of connection and transcendence. Throughout, Wang seeks to document the sacred in the mundane--the numinous opening of a moment when one's heart drops its guard and the aliveness of the world can enter--where everything is bequeathed with ontological dignity, not because it is useful, but because it exists.

Review Quotes

"Here dreams are spaces of radical possibility, and as in the real world, the possibilities are sometimes magical and sometimes nightmarish and sometimes both, like dress rehearsals for the apocalypse."--Elisa Gabbert, The New York Times, in praise of The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void

"Jackie Wang's The Sunflower Cast A Spell To Save Us From The Void is a gorgeous, ambitious, phantasmagoric lament for the better worlds our bodies tell us must be possible, every day, even when we're numb with pain."--Chris Nealon

About the Author

Jackie Wang is a poet, scholar, multimedia artist, and Assistant Professor of Literary Arts at Brown University. She is the author of Carceral Capitalism ( 2018), the poetry collection The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void (Nightboat Books, 2021; National Book Award Finalist, Lambda Literary Award Finalist), and the experimental essay and poetry collection Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun (2023). She is also the co-author, with the Precarity Lab, of Technoprecarious (2020). She holds a PhD and MA from Harvard University and a BA from New College of Florida.