"Grief emphatic, grief redeeming, grief protacted, grief abraded all
intertwine in this funny, prickly memoir." -David Denby, The New
Yorker
With fearlessness and grace, Bough Down reports from deep inside the
maelstrom of grief. In this profoundly beautiful and intensely moving
lament, artist and writer Karen Green conjures the inscrutable space of
love and loss, clarity and contradiction, sense and madness. She summons
memory and the machination of the interior mind with the emotional
acuity of music as she charts her passage through the devastation of her
husband's suicide. In crystalline fragments of text, Green's voice is
paradoxically confessional and non-confessional: moments in her journey
are devastating but also luminous, exacting in sensation but also
ambiguous and layered in meaning. Her world is haunted by the
unnameable, and yet she renders that world with poetic precision in her
struggle to make sense of not only of death but of living. In
counterpoint, tiny visual collages punctuate the text, each made of
salvaged language and scraps of the material world--pages torn from
books, bits of paper refuse, drawings and photographs, old postage
stamps and the albums which classify them. Each collage--and the
creative act of making it--evinces the reassembling of life. A
breathtaking lyric elegy, Bough Down uses music and silence, color and
its absence, authority of experience and the doubt that trembles at its
center to fulfill a humane artistic vision. This is a lapidary, keenly
observed work, awash with the honesty of an open heart.
