An Encyclopedia of Bending Time by Kristin Keane

I remember pre-ordering it once, but maybe I forgot and ordered it twice? That sounds like me. Somehow I came to have two copies of Kristin’s book. (I should say Kristin Keane and I are not related as far as I know, though we do apparently share a fondness for Quantum Leap. And look at that cover! Can’t you just feel the pebbled hardcover of your childhood encyclopedia, if you are a reader of a certain age, under your fingers? With a condensed lyric brevity that doesn’t sacrifice story as it invites the reader to choose their own entry into the narrative, Keane’s book is both an elegy for her mother and a meditation on loss, time, and our efforts to contain and expand it. See also Diagnosis, Sorrow, Novikov Self-Consistency Principle. Entries for Kant, Freud, Hawking, and Gestalt Empty Chair Technique cross-reference with entries for Home Depot, Quantum Leap, and the alien-child sitcom Out of This World. Why pick the traditional narrative track when your story can instead, as Jane Alison prompts, meander, spiral, or even explode? Okay, so maybe I just like being difficult.īut Kristin Keane’s An Encyclopedia of Bending Time, a slim, elegant memoir about losing her mother, shaped as an encyclopedia (remember those?), arrived in the mail from the good folks at Barrelhouse Books at just the right time. Once you start re-mixing your form, anything’s possible. Maybe it’s also my fondness for hybrid nonfiction. Maybe it’s my brain’s way of reminding me I’m still a poet, even though I haven’t written many poems over the last several years. I’ve been thinking about forms for nonfiction lately and how much I gravitate toward an organizing structure that both shapes and informs.

An Encyclopedia of Bending Time by Kristin Keane