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Fugitive Assemblage
$24.00
A Novel by Jennifer Calkins Published by The 3rd Thing Fugitive Assemblage is lyric noir. It takes place in California in 1983. A woman pulls an IV out of her arm, walks out of the hospital and starts driving north. She is bleeding and nauseous and ever aware that there is something in the trunk of…
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Description
About the Book
Fugitive Assemblage is lyric noir. It takes place in California in 1983. A woman pulls an IV out of her arm, walks out of the hospital and starts driving north. She is bleeding and nauseous and ever aware that there is something in the trunk of her car that is rotting. It is only after she makes her way through Big Sur and Monterey, over the mountains and into the Central Valley, that she discovers where to bury the body, so to speak. Fugitive Assemblage is rigorously loyal to human emotion. Rather than allow the stricture of narrative to manipulate and drive emotion, emotion emerges in Fugitive Assemblage through form and language. In it, the California highway is a skeleton and its flesh is the voices of ghosts. Fugitive Assemblage renders sensation, because emotion is tied with physical experience. It incorporates images. It uses the harmony (or, more often disharmony) of numerous ghostly voices, from women’s diaries of the “westward journey,” to geology texts, Ingeborg Bachman’s poetry, to Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. It draws on science, on family history and on personal trauma to evoke the experience of grief.
FICTION
ISBN: 978-1-7344071-0-5
Trade Paper
164 pages, 5.5″ x 8″
About the Author
Jennifer Calkins is a writer, attorney and evolutionary biologist. Her academic credentials include a Ph.D. in biological science, an M.F.A. in creative writing and a J.D. in law. Between 2010 and 2015 she produced The Quail Diaries, an interdisciplinary project melding science and lyric essay. Her most recent creative works are published in The Fanzine, Entropy, Queen Mob’s Teahouse and Quarterly West. Her peer reviewed humanities and scientific works are published in Configurations, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, and Animal Behaviour, among other journals. Her natural history writing has appeared online at the The New York Times, National Geographic, and Voices for Biodiversity. She is the author of the chapbook Devil Card (Beard of Bees Press) and the book A Story of Witchery (Les Figues Press). She lives in Seattle with creatures including teenagers.
Praise for Fugitive Assemblage
Fugitive Assemblage is mysterious, restless, searching, flat out beautiful, and finally, heartbreaking. I don’t think I’ve ever read grief in a way that feels so true. And then there is just this absolute pleasure in the language, the atmosphere, the constant move forward through the Southern California landscape and through history. Joan Didion meets Bhanu Kapil meets the films of Kelly Reichardt. It’s like a long, hot day that turns into a harrowing night, and yet at the end, somehow, there is a sense of peace. – Amina Cain
Tracing and butting up: blood lines, boundary lines, familial lineages, the lines on maps. Calkins reveals the unresolved, the lost, the inaccessible, and the lingering of the fugitive assemblage which is grief and journey and rupture and self. Oh, dear reader, how do I even attempt to describe the breathlessness and devastation felt while navigating this heartbreaking and tender text? “If it is love that injures, how can we heal,” the text asks, and all I can do is plumb the inescapable depths of my own meanderings, a preposterous weight that crawls up my spine and splits my bowels. Fugitive Assemblage is piercing and marvelous. Autumn approaches and I sit at my desk alone, weeping. Indeed, “all of this is story.” – Janice Lee
Jennifer Calkins is a scientist /poet / teacher /parent and environmental lawyer. She is also blessed with the wisdom and clarity that depression instills. She paints bleak and beautiful landscapes in our brains with all of the grace and horror of Cormac McCarthy. Fugitive Assemblage is a road story, a darkly funny odyssey in a Datsun careening thru a desert apocalyptic California haunted by ancestral demons. This is Jennifer’s best work to date. Get in the Datsun. – Thor Harris
Recorded Readings, Reviews & Conversations with the Author
- LARB | Somatic Noir: On Jennifer Calkins’s Fugitive Assemblage
- Janice Lee and Jennifer Calkins — Imagine a Death: A Novel & Fugitive Assemblage
- Big Other | Loneliness and Plurality: Jennifer Calkins’s Fugitive Assemblage
- The Offing | An excerpt from Fugitive Assemblage
About The Press
“The third thing” is the idea that emerges when we use imagination instead of compromise to solve a problem, meet a need, repair an injury, right a wrong, answer a question, question an answer, to get where we’re going, to go somewhere new.
The 3rd Thing is an independent press dedicated to publishing necessary alternatives. Every year or so we publish a cohort of projects representing in form, content and perspective our interdisciplinary, intersectional priorities. We think of each project in the cohort as a break in the stockade—a way out of the settlement and into the wilderness. Come through.
Often our books are the result of an artist working in a non-dominant discipline—a playwright writes a book of poems, a theater-maker writes a book of essays, a filmmaker writes a book of theory…. And while our emphasis is on print traditions, our projects may take any number of forms: books, broadsides, performances, installations, colloquia, video anthologies, etc.
We publish work primarily by artists and writers who identify as members of traditionally marginalized groups, primarily Indigenous people, womxn, queer people and people of color.
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