Carrion
Winner of the 2021 Quill Prose Award
Carrion is an ambitiously structured collection that honors the literary forebears at its center while lamenting our inability to communicate anything—love, need, hope—except in metaphors.
Just as Odin’s ravens would whisper everything he couldn’t see, so too do these and other mythical ravens function in Jamison’s essay collection: they are tools to interpret and make meaning of their world, rent as it is between the rural and urban, the romantic and abusive, where language is both surfeit and dearth. This collection sees mythical ravens murmur alongside the actual bone and viscera of crows, starlings, and pigeons in disarming explorations of desire and destruction, the body and creation.
** You’re not too poor to contour. But if you are too poor for dental work, let me know, and I can send you a copy.
Praise
“Dark oracles always speak with serpent tongues, forked to hold multiple truths. I reveled in this book, cast among ruin and shadow but finding fierce life there. Beneath hard surfaces deep human passion flares. What myth tore asunder language tries to stitch back together, prose so phosphorescent it assumes the aspect of poetry.”
— Kazim Ali, author of Northern Light: Power, Land, and the Memory of Water
“To dare to sink into darkness, to dare to stare straight into the sun, to dare to build a structure that will take one far from fear but also bliss—these are the ways in which Wes Jamison inscribes a body and soul into being. With deep philosophical plunges and transformative flights of linguistic consideration and fancy, Carrion soars right into the sun. In Jamison's insightful prose, they take us so close to disaster that we hear the singe and feel the burn.”
— Jenny Boully, author of Betwixt-and-Between
“In a tangle of connective tissue, Jamison enacts a kind of spellcasting, a spoken worm that burrows in the mind. It’s a collection that gives pause, makes you stop to fixate on the dead raven at sidewalk’s edge. You know this body is Other and poison, but you can’t help the twitch in your fingers, that pull that makes you want to reach out and touch it. Spread it open. Divine what’s inside."
— Kym Cunningham, author of Difficulty Swallowing and new mythologies
“There are symbols and some metaphors but no euphemism…. All these essays broach subjects that may not be some ‘bedside’ reading subjects…, but Jamison faces them head on…. We need this book.”