"Curious, lonely, mournful, haunted, and strangely funny."
--Leslie Jamison, author of the NYT bestseller The Empathy Exams
In her extraordinary graphic novel--which masterfully incorporates
poetry and elements of memoir--Lauren Haldeman layers the warfare of
soccer over the battlefields now called Bull Run Regional Park, where,
growing up, her soccer team would practice and compete. The park and
surrounding town of Fairfax Station Virginia set the landscape for the
book, where the narrator regularly encounters spectral visions of
wounded soldiers and very real artifacts of war-- "wounded wraiths and
faceless shapes" float in her hallway at night, and bullet shells,
buttons, and human bones surface around the soccer fields in daylight.
The narrator turns to poetry and history to make sense of the town and
its bloodshed, of its forever attachment to injustice and its inability
to restore erased identities. Team Photograph is a journey from
research to illumination, and the result is a tender yet powerful
reckoning of time and place, proof that the past and the present are
inexorably fused together.