Launch of is/was by Jenny Sampirisi
If you are in the Toronto area, you’ll want to attend the launch of Jenny Sampirisi’s debut novel, is/was (Insomniac Press, 2008).
Sampirisi is the second writer I’ve edited for the Wayside/Serotonin imprint (shared with JP Fiorentino). This is a tight, dense, and complex work, lovely in its use of language, and frightening in its implications. Read this book. The launch will feature Sampirisi reading from her novel, as well as an interview conducted by Jude MacDonald (the author of Grey: Stories and Jane — another highly recommended book).
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Set in the media-saturated 1980s, when images of missing children first occupied the public imagination, is/was explores one town’s complex emotional reaction to the brutal rape and murder of a child within its bounds.
It is October 1983 and eight-year-old Abigail Wren has gone missing from a tiny Ontario town. In the crosscuts and fragments of each day’s news, word of the abduction filters into the troubled Fitch family household. Roland Fitch becomes unhinged by long kept secrets, while his wife Eva, turns inwards, tracing the aftermath of her own surgically precise loss. In the days and weeks following Abigail Wren’s death, the Fitch children, Andrew and Isabel, are increasingly left to parent themselves. As the already tenuous boundaries between family members are slowly effaced, once solid definitions – of the child, the adult, and the body – come unmoored.
At its core, is/was is an unflinching meditation set at the very edge of human limits. Boundaries of language, media, and the body itself transform to hold the complex currents of lust and absence. This investigative first novel is never reductive, but with subtlety and nuance, unfolds the terrible trajectory of loss.
PRAISE FOR IS/WAS
is/was is a shattering portrait of the psychological effects on one family of sudden and inexplicable violence. Jenny Sampirisi evokes dissociated states of mind and blocked communication with impressive precision. Tuned in to the body and its almost alternate life, this narrative pulls the reader into the gradually unfolding suspense of suspended knowing.
— Daphne Marlatt, author of Taken and Ana Historic
is/was explores loss in its immensity, but it rivets us, always, to its world of details. To the micro-rituals of conduct during periods of duress. To the concreteness of words on the page and the capillary routes of the sentence. Jenny Sampirisi is at once a marvelously fearless and disciplined writer.
– David Chariandy, author of Soucouyant
In the Canadian experimental lineage of Atom Egoyan’s film Exotica, Lynn Crosbie’s poetry Missing Children and Gail Scott’s novel Main Brides, this searing story of a bereft family at its core searches to reunite pain’s palimpsest with its fleshed healing. Sampirisi keenly makes us ache for a renewed stab at what was and can be.
– Margaret Christakos, author of Excessive Love Prosthesis and What Stirs
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jenny Sampirisi is a poet, prose writer and editor. She is the managing editor for BookThug and facilitates the online vispo journal, Other Cl/utter. She teaches English at Ryerson University where she runs the Ryerson Reading Series. She is also an executive member of the Scream Literary Festival. Her first novel, is/was (Insomniac Press 2008) explores the flexible boundaries of language, media, and the body.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
Jude MacDonald is the author of Jane (1999) and Grey: Stories for Grown-Ups (2001) and the editor of section15.ca.
Posted: November 10th, 2008 under Books, Wayside Editions.