BOOK FORMAT Hardcover, 6.25 x 7.75 in. / 188 pgs / 53 color.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 4/30/2013 Active
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: SPRING 2013 p. 71
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9781938221019TRADE List Price: $36.00 CAD $47.50 GBP £32.00
AVAILABILITY In stock
"This exquisite book is an impressionistic miracle, an assemblage of short text fragments and collages by an artist trying to make sense of her husband's suicide. That this husband was David Foster Wallace is beautifully beside the point, for the focus here is on the experience, the bleak and necessary journey of grief. Green is a pointed writer, open and at a distance all at once. The effect is unsettling, elliptical, necessarily open-ended and at times brutally revealing: a necessary explication of loss as a fact of daily life."
- David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times book critic
"Grief emphatic, grief redeeming, grief protacted, grief abraded all intertwine in this funny, prickly memoir.” –David Denby, The New Yorker
With fearlessness and grace,Bough Down reports from deep inside the maelstrom of grief. In this profoundly beautiful and intensely moving lament, artist and writer Karen Green conjures the inscrutable space of love and loss, clarity and contradiction, sense and madness. She summons memory and the machination of the interior mind with the emotional acuity of music as she charts her passage through the devastation of her husband’s suicide. In crystalline fragments of text, Green’s voice is paradoxically confessional and non-confessional: moments in her journey are devastating but also luminous, exacting in sensation but also ambiguous and layered in meaning. Her world is haunted by the unnameable, and yet she renders that world with poetic precision in her struggle to make sense of not only of death but of living. In counterpoint, tiny visual collages punctuate the text, each made of salvaged language and scraps of the material world—pages torn from books, bits of paper refuse, drawings and photographs, old postage stamps and the albums which classify them. Each collage--and the creative act of making it--evinces the reassembling of life. A breathtaking lyric elegy, Bough Down uses music and silence, color and its absence, authority of experience and the doubt that trembles at its center to fulfill a humane artistic vision. This is a lapidary, keenly observed work, awash with the honesty of an open heart.
Featured image is reproduced from Karen Green: Bough Down.
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
Los Angeles Times
David Ulins
This exquisite book is an impressionistic miracle, an assemblage of short text fragments and collages by an artist trying to make sense of her husband's suicide. That this husband was David Foster Wallace is beautifully beside the point, for the focus here is on the experience, the bleak and necessary journey of grief. Green is a pointed writer, open and at a distance all at once. The effect is unsettling, elliptical, necessarily open-ended and at times brutally revealing: a necessary explication of loss as a fact of daily life.
The Believer
Andi Mudd
To those who have lived through such a loss, this punishingly tender elegy may have totemic power, but to every reader Green’s empathy, her humor, and her observations—so clear they are nearly hallucinatory—are strong medicine.
Publisher's Weekly
Editors
The book hints at healing, but with such stream-of-consciousness prose and a traumatic subject, closure may be too much to hope for: Green’s last words on the subject are an abrupt: “I can’t wrap this up.”
Los Angeles Review of Books
Maggie Nelson
“KAREN GREEN’S NEW — and incredibly, her first — book Bough Down, from Siglio Press, is an astonishment. It is one of the most moving, strange, original, harrowing, and beautiful documents of grief and reckoning I’ve read. The book consists of a series of prose poems, or individuated chunks of poetic prose, interspersed with postage-stamp-sized collages made by Green, who is also a visual artist. Collectively the text bears witness to the 2008 suicide of her husband, the writer David Foster Wallace, and its harrowing aftermath for Green. “
The New Yorker
David Denby
Grief emphatic, grief redeeming, grief protacted, grief abraded all intertwine in this funny, prickly memoir.
The Improbable
Emily Pullen
That her husband was a public figure (though if you don't know who, don't look it up until you’ve read the book) means that there was a very public reaction to his death. But Bough Down brings to the reader her more private sadness, the complexity of emotion that surrounds mental illness and suicide and grief, the identification and sympathy and anger that she went through trying to figure out what her life might look like after such loss. Green starts simply by observing the materials of her life, of his life, of their lives together. What she ends up giving us is so much more.
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"Karen Green's raw, elegant first book—a mixture of verse paragraphs, images of miniature mixed-media collages (Green is also a visual artist), and blank pages—is a moving portrait of love, marriage, the untimely death of a spouse, the poet's ensuing grief, and the marriage that still, somehow, remains." continue to blog
This weekend, Martin Riker reviewed Karen Green’s Bough Down, published by Siglio, in the Wall Street Journal. "Part memoir, part artist's book, Bough Down is Karen Green's chronicle of the suicide of her husband, David Foster Wallace, and of her own mourning. It is a delicate vellum-covered object, in which narrative scenes are interspersed with abstract collages (most of them not much larger than a postage stamp and some made out of actual stamps). Ms. Green turns out to be a profoundly good writer: Bough Down is lovely, smart and funny, in addition to being brutally clear and sad…. Perhaps most impressive about Bough Down is that, despite the poetic pitch of its language, it refuses to poeticize its subject. It does not resolve into pure despondency, on the one hand, or redemptive hope, on the other. Instead, Ms. Green registers the complexity of grief and in the process makes something beautiful out of the saddest stuff in the world." Karen Green will appear at 192 Books in New York this Friday, May 31 at 7PM, for a book signing and reception. Space is limited, so please RSVP at 212-255-4022 or info@192books.com. continue to blog
NEW YORK Showroom by Appointment Only 75 Broad Street, Suite 630 New York NY 10004 Tel 212 627 1999
LOS ANGELES Showroom by Appointment Only
818 S. Broadway, Suite 700 Los Angeles, CA 90014 Tel. 323 969 8985
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FORMAT: Hbk, 6.25 x 7.75 in. / 188 pgs / 53 color. LIST PRICE: U.S. $36.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $47.5 GBP £32.00 ISBN: 9781938221019 PUBLISHER: Siglio AVAILABLE: 4/30/2013 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Active AVAILABILITY: In stock TERRITORY: WORLD Except France
"Grief emphatic, grief redeeming, grief protacted, grief abraded all intertwine in this funny, prickly memoir.” –David Denby, The New Yorker
With fearlessness and grace,Bough Down reports from deep inside the maelstrom of grief. In this profoundly beautiful and intensely moving lament, artist and writer Karen Green conjures the inscrutable space of love and loss, clarity and contradiction, sense and madness. She summons memory and the machination of the interior mind with the emotional acuity of music as she charts her passage through the devastation of her husband’s suicide. In crystalline fragments of text, Green’s voice is paradoxically confessional and non-confessional: moments in her journey are devastating but also luminous, exacting in sensation but also ambiguous and layered in meaning. Her world is haunted by the unnameable, and yet she renders that world with poetic precision in her struggle to make sense of not only of death but of living. In counterpoint, tiny visual collages punctuate the text, each made of salvaged language and scraps of the material world—pages torn from books, bits of paper refuse, drawings and photographs, old postage stamps and the albums which classify them. Each collage--and the creative act of making it--evinces the reassembling of life. A breathtaking lyric elegy, Bough Down uses music and silence, color and its absence, authority of experience and the doubt that trembles at its center to fulfill a humane artistic vision. This is a lapidary, keenly observed work, awash with the honesty of an open heart.
