"'Go fish, Kimche, go fish,' says her grandmother Fanya. And fish Kim Dana Kupperman does, down into the deep and uncertain pool of suicide, death by AIDS, religious identity, bodies altered by the radiation poured forth at Chernobyl. These linked stories add up to a life—her life—in ways that are both harrowing and affirming, and that command our readerly respect."
I’m preoccupied with how the
practice of secret keeping begins, with putting my finger on the origin of
behavior as easily as I might touch a map to locate a town or a river. Perhaps
pinpointing these intersections—of time and geography, the movement of ordinary
lives along those continuums—will help reshape a memory fractured by
omissions.
—from “Teeth in the Wind”
Kim Dana Kupperman’s essays plumb the emotional
and spiritual depths of a transitory life. Her episodic “missives” cover
territory from the chaos of a frenetic childhood to love affairs, failed and
otherwise, to the Chernobyl nuclear accident, to an ocean-crossing search for
her family’s Eastern European roots. In confident, lyrical prose, Kupperman
leads the reader through a winding gallery—a collection of still lifes and
portraits, landscapes of loneliness and love.
“[These essays] return readers to the
fundamental nonfiction experience, an immersion in real life, exquisitely
rendered. Here is a world—her world—so finely observed that it becomes our
world, too. Here is a voice, both smoldering and meditative, that inhabits
every page like an attentive host, inviting us in and offering no choice but to
step over the threshold.”
—SUE HALPERN, Bakeless Nonfiction Judge, from her
introduction
