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julenetrippweaver 's review for:
Body Geographic
by Barrie Jean Borich
Exquisite writing! Poetic and engaging. I did not think I would be interested in a memoir about maps set in the Midwest (Chicago & Minneapolis), but once I started reading I was hooked by her eloquence. Each chapter unfolded in a way that was integrated and beautiful about the immigration of her family, and mapping geography through the female body.
I loved her essay in Wave-Form so plan to read all her books. Oddly enough, I already had her books checked 'Want to Read' in Goodreads! Also, I recently read a review out about her new book, "Apocalypse, Darling."
Some quotes:
"Historians say the story of the world is a roll call of migrations,..."
"Longing has a way of moving the body forward, that lean toward, that palpitating chest ache, desire a wheel."
Her wife Linnea says: "When we fear something we don't hear what’s really there, but rather what we imagine."
In the section: Point of Destination: Such a City, she reflects on her brief eye connection with Lauren Hutton, who she was obsessed with when an adolescent:
"When the object of a long-held gaze catches your eye, gazes back, the gaze returned becomes a loop, a refrain, less migration than a circular route, no longer a progression toward but instead a meditation of the being. I will never again be the lean young woman with the camera, and neither will Lauren Hutton. And so we meet. In this corner."
"American youth is for wandering dim-lit streets, for reaching up to a stage, a dollar bill gripped between the knuckles, homage to a dance of gender and sex, to the certainty that anything is possible."
"Water pulls the body forward. Water hems the body in. Nothing feeds longing like uncertainty, and nothing is more uncertain than a horizon line where the wide haze of water swallows the hard border of sky." The beginning of the chapter where her and her wife travel to New Orleans for her parent's fiftieth wedding anniversary. It is in the aftermath of Katrina and we see the city so fully through their eyes.
There are sections that are italicized in the book, even more poetic, here is one:
"Underneath are maps that are torn away or stored elsewhere, maps of usual stories, of sobering up, of marrying, of calling a marriage a marriage, calling a queer marriage just a marriage, a newer version of marriage made of both staying married and questioning the nature of marriage, that is both progressing and staying in place on a map of twenty years of some sickness, some health, on the south side of some city that keeps changing."
"Underneath are so many incomplete maps of a Chicagoland childhood and adolescence, all the illegible moments and unmappable people who made and remade us, and the maps that made or remade their maps."
Her wife gets a brain tumor, "The MRI of Linnea's brain looked like a map, a flat scan of what's really a glbular mass. Impressions that look like roadways or the tributaries of rievers, marking the folds in the tissues, the tumor a round section where the color changed, from smoky white to gray. If her brain scan were a highway map her tumor would appear to be a city, a dead metropolis, soon to be detonated, remade into open space, ready for either regret or development."
She survives. But, "In the letter Linnea left she'd written me free. Love well, she wrote. Love widely. Did she know what I'd already conjured? The new lover and I on a stone bridge of some downtown, the city rising behind us like a pearl curtain, gaunt thighs and hard arms holding me from behind, woman or man or some body inbetween. I don't know what kind I would love or even fuck after twenty years faithful to Linnea, so I pictured all kinds, full-breasted and flat, maybe fingers, maybe phallus, likely silicone, possibly flesh. The betrayal is not that I thought of other bodies but that some moments, tired of waiting, I even hoped for them, not parked loss but the open map, another beginning, un mediated blue."
"The commonness of mortality may be its most excruciating beauty."
Also here is much to learn about maps, such as the phrase "Here Be Monsters" which was attributed to medieval cartographers. Open sea areas in their maps contained monsters. The book is filled with maps, with reference material for each one in the back.
A potent book to read today when immigrants are under threat and attack. Now we have gay marriage, back when she got married to a woman we did not. In this book we are witness to long term love, and see the gay community integrated into our landscape.
I loved her essay in Wave-Form so plan to read all her books. Oddly enough, I already had her books checked 'Want to Read' in Goodreads! Also, I recently read a review out about her new book, "Apocalypse, Darling."
Some quotes:
"Historians say the story of the world is a roll call of migrations,..."
"Longing has a way of moving the body forward, that lean toward, that palpitating chest ache, desire a wheel."
Her wife Linnea says: "When we fear something we don't hear what’s really there, but rather what we imagine."
In the section: Point of Destination: Such a City, she reflects on her brief eye connection with Lauren Hutton, who she was obsessed with when an adolescent:
"When the object of a long-held gaze catches your eye, gazes back, the gaze returned becomes a loop, a refrain, less migration than a circular route, no longer a progression toward but instead a meditation of the being. I will never again be the lean young woman with the camera, and neither will Lauren Hutton. And so we meet. In this corner."
"American youth is for wandering dim-lit streets, for reaching up to a stage, a dollar bill gripped between the knuckles, homage to a dance of gender and sex, to the certainty that anything is possible."
"Water pulls the body forward. Water hems the body in. Nothing feeds longing like uncertainty, and nothing is more uncertain than a horizon line where the wide haze of water swallows the hard border of sky." The beginning of the chapter where her and her wife travel to New Orleans for her parent's fiftieth wedding anniversary. It is in the aftermath of Katrina and we see the city so fully through their eyes.
There are sections that are italicized in the book, even more poetic, here is one:
"Underneath are maps that are torn away or stored elsewhere, maps of usual stories, of sobering up, of marrying, of calling a marriage a marriage, calling a queer marriage just a marriage, a newer version of marriage made of both staying married and questioning the nature of marriage, that is both progressing and staying in place on a map of twenty years of some sickness, some health, on the south side of some city that keeps changing."
"Underneath are so many incomplete maps of a Chicagoland childhood and adolescence, all the illegible moments and unmappable people who made and remade us, and the maps that made or remade their maps."
Her wife gets a brain tumor, "The MRI of Linnea's brain looked like a map, a flat scan of what's really a glbular mass. Impressions that look like roadways or the tributaries of rievers, marking the folds in the tissues, the tumor a round section where the color changed, from smoky white to gray. If her brain scan were a highway map her tumor would appear to be a city, a dead metropolis, soon to be detonated, remade into open space, ready for either regret or development."
She survives. But, "In the letter Linnea left she'd written me free. Love well, she wrote. Love widely. Did she know what I'd already conjured? The new lover and I on a stone bridge of some downtown, the city rising behind us like a pearl curtain, gaunt thighs and hard arms holding me from behind, woman or man or some body inbetween. I don't know what kind I would love or even fuck after twenty years faithful to Linnea, so I pictured all kinds, full-breasted and flat, maybe fingers, maybe phallus, likely silicone, possibly flesh. The betrayal is not that I thought of other bodies but that some moments, tired of waiting, I even hoped for them, not parked loss but the open map, another beginning, un mediated blue."
"The commonness of mortality may be its most excruciating beauty."
Also here is much to learn about maps, such as the phrase "Here Be Monsters" which was attributed to medieval cartographers. Open sea areas in their maps contained monsters. The book is filled with maps, with reference material for each one in the back.
A potent book to read today when immigrants are under threat and attack. Now we have gay marriage, back when she got married to a woman we did not. In this book we are witness to long term love, and see the gay community integrated into our landscape.