A Mouth of Vowels

This novel visually and narratively lives within the footnotes. The dominant story -- of the husband, the abuser -- is erased, visually blank apart from a few irruptions that invade the white space above the footnotes.

Trying to establish stability and meaning, a woman gathers and unravels a litany of distances, measurements, checks and balances. Sounds and scents are mixed in a form of post-traumatic synesthesia. Time is collapsed into a basket of humming vowels.

The typical function of the footnote as a reference bringing the reader toward deeper understanding of the main text is subverted. The narrator inserts herself in its spaces, while the reliability of the footnote and of its narrator become increasingly unstable. Her tangling and untangling narrative shifts back and forth as memories intrude on her day-to-day domestic tasks. The narrative becomes increasingly fragmentary, coalescing with the sound of a gunshot as a hunter takes down a deer.

This is a book for readers who love language, experiments with form, and a character they can get behind.