Between Appear And Disappear: full-color illustrated edition by Rice, Doug (2013) Paperback

by Doug Rice

Book #4 in our Blue Bustard Memoir Series “Between Appear and Disappear is a secular prayer, a body prayer, between seeing and saying, between experience and representation. It is the only book that I have ever read in my life that is truly corporeal, which is to say truly emobdied by and through desire in language. I will hold it close to my heart for the rest of my life. Kind of I wanted to eat it. Definitely I slept with it under my pillow. It is an unforgettable and perfect book at a time when we need books to be exactly what they are, gloriously, unapologetically, mercifully real. —Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Chronology of Water and A Headcase "beautiful-beyond-words” —Sharon Doubiago, author of My Father’s Love, Love in the Streets, and Hard Country The blood of Mai’s ancestors run through her syllables. She takes photographs of sentences she abandoned in childhood—that loss of memory, that theme of what photography exposes. Written in the breath of a man in love, a novel, a poem, a photo album, this delirium of river language is finally a treatise on writing. ‘Her breath remains in my mouth.’ She told him the Vietnamese legend of a story that never begins, darker than any darkness when her family pushes their unsteady boat into the water. They fear arriving as much as they fear drowning. “Every word is a goodbye.” She escapes sentences. Her body lay against him like moonlight.

Paperback

First published September 5, 2013

About the author

Doug Rice is the author of When Love Was, Here Lies Memory, An Erotics of Seeing, Dream Memoirs of a Fabulist, Faraway, So Close, Between Appear and Disappear, The Sacred Book of Silence (translated into the German as Das Heilige Buch der Stille), Blood of Mugwump (translated into the French as Le Sang des Mugwump), Skin Prayer: fragments of abject memory, and A Good CuntBoy is Hard to Find. His work has appeared in numerous anthologies qnd journals including Dirty: Dirty, Avant Pop: Fiction for a Daydream Nation, Alice Redux, Kiss the Sky, Phantoms of Desire, Discourse, Gargoyle, Zyzzyvya, Fiction International, and others. He is the recipient of an Arts Residency at the Akademie Schloss Solitude (Stuttgart, Germany) 2010-2012. He teaches Creative Writing and Film Studies. He has a B.A. from Slippery Rock State College, studied for an MA under John Gardner at SUNY-Binghamton, has an MA from Duquesne University and studied for his PhD at the University of Pittsburgh.

Reviews

[Peter E. Frangel · Rating 5 out of 5]

What I most loved was the use of space on the page, and the way the photos and words worked to give you time to reflect on the things that were being shared. This is a memoir, but mostly it is many little pieces of life and philosophy and art pieced together into a mosaic that is this one individual, Mae.

[Joseph Schreiber · Rating 4 out of 5]

A mix of memoir, poetry, photo essay, story telling and meditation on language and what it contains—what it can convey. Syllables, words, sentences are born of flesh and bone, carry the weight of history and the lightness of desire. This is an incantatory work—a love story and an evocation of the embodiment of language.

[J.C. · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is best read in silence, outside by the shade of trees. That's how i read it, so trust me when I say this is a very powerful book. You must be patient with it, contemplate not only the words and the photographs but the spaces as well. Sometimes the turning of the pages. A few times I found myself almost weeping, swept under by the memoir's power and beauty. Other times I felt the presence of goosebumps on my arms. The moments never lasted long with the mosquitos sucking my blood. There is no doubt that the intimacy of this memoir is something I have rarely experienced and feel enriched now that I have.

[Keith Carmona · Rating 5 out of 5]

Once again, Doug Rice brings memory, loss, desire, and love between the whispers of the past and the photographs of the moment. Like the river, it is gentle and violent and constantly moving. Changing. Less of a book, more like theater, we participate in the myths, the gaze, the remembering.