River

by Ross Gay, Richard Wehrenberg

Using the Jordan River in Bloomington, Indiana as a spine/guide, River forms a small map of local/personal & collective/historical erasure. Ross Gay & Richard Wehrenberg, Jr.’s stories of the rivers from their lives create interstices of illumination in the space somewhere between remembering and forgetting. Featuring hand-drawn maps & a deconstructive history of the Jordan River & early president of Indiana University David Starr Jordan, for whom the river is named, this brief, multifaceted collection pulsates with the question how do we begin to remember what was effaced? and digs at the tradition of curated forgetting in the capital-genuflecting epoch in which we are currently embedded.

Genres: Poetry

40 pages

First published December 1, 2014

About the author

Ross Gay is an American poet, essayist, and professor who won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for his 2014 book Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, which was also a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry.

His honors include being a Cave Canem Workshop fellow and a Bread Loaf Writers' Conference Tuition Scholar, and he received a grant from the Pennsylvania Council of the Arts.

He is an associate professor of poetry at Indiana University and teaches in Drew University’s low-residency MFA program in poetry. He also serves on the board of the Bloomington Community Orchard.

Reviews

[Brandon · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is the 341st day of 2021, and I've just read my 143rd book.
"POW!"

I started this yearlong endeavor spiritually intoxicated, smelling of fate. One of the last books I read of 2020 was The Alchemist, a literary adventure which gave new articulation to this agnostic awed by (perceived) "omens". A few days into the new year, I was tattooed with the above - an acknowledgement to a hero, Mr. Rogers, and an affirmation of self-love*.

Months later and the goal switched, largely because Calvin, my reading competition, was not going to be bested by triple digits alone. I was inspired again to aim higher.

In all this reading, no writer has featured more than Bloomington's own Ross Gay. I was introduced to his work through Alex, a friend from TEDxIU, who co-curated a bookclub on his Book of Delights in the fall of 2020. I was in artistic love. This year presented the opportunity to experience the entirety of his publications.

River is a chapbook of local collaboration between Ross Gay, Richard Wehrenberg Jr., and artist Rose Zinnia. Getting my hands on a copy was a pain in the ass. Only 500 were ever printed. None were for sale. My go to libraries, Indiana University and Monroe County, had zilch. Finally, I thought to check WorldCat: there were 7 copies publicly available.
"EUREKA!"
I could request an interlibrary loan. Last night, after so much love-based build-up, I got my hands on it. My year-to-date total sat at 142.

This morning, I went to Bloomington North High School for the epilogue of my field experience (classroom work for future teachers) to say goodbye to the first class I've ever really worked with. It was a tender and bittersweet goodbye. In a generous whole-class debrief, I was asked why I was there, why I wanted to become an educator. In short, I said it was because literacy and its application was essential in my process of becoming, that teaching was frontline work in the effort for Goodness, and that the calling was a kind of 'paying forward' to the people - teachers and artists - who had given so generously to me.

This afternoon, I read River. The Jordan River, here in Bloomington, is the titular body; yet, it is synecdochical for the de facto rivers in the life of Ross and Richard, a nameless tributary to the Delaware River near Levittown, Pennsylvania, and the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio respectfully.

Can you see the mimesis - the flow of thoughts tributaries themselves? The waters are vehicles, references for remembrance. Like Hesse's Siddhartha, the rivers are subjects of meditation from which this mental panning can deliver pieces of gold. Wehrenberg writes that one river experience left him, "aware of a sonorous mass called world." (p. 17) Much like contemplating one, reading River produces a state in which the incredible complexity and interconnectedness of life is not just perceived but felt - a mental shift akin to the sudden and startling awareness of breath. An attention that imbues normal reality "as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars — compassion, love, the subsurface unity of all things." [1]

In the wake of my tidal expectations, I was let down by River, so small and anecdotal. Then I realized I was only seeing the surface.

There is only one water.
-------------------
*
1 = I
4 = Love
3 = You
*
[1] David Foster Wallace, *This Is Water*

[Greg Bem · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is my first encounter with Ross Gay's writing and Richard Wehrenberg, Jr.'s writing. The writing itself is stellar, but the entire read through I kept desiring more, more, more! I was hoping for greater artifacts and longer, enduring footnotes. I wanted more images, more explanations, more explications. In the end, the book stands tall on its own, but in a temporal way, a way that sadly detracts from the metaphorical bend, the oxbows, of the river through time.

[Anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really loved this chapbook. They collect memories of the Jordan River in Bloomington, Indiana (and other rivers like the Cuyahoga) through short essays and scrawled maps, and the effect is beautiful and haunting. I wish I could own a copy, but, alas, the publisher is out of business.

“There is something unfathomably essential about continually perceiving things anew, a visceral shuffling of your intuition. And something that rubs against even that, almost corporeally. Something trying to remember it all being washed irrevocably over. An elegy for forgetting. A map of erasure. Ground we must dig to find the root of our current bearing. The inexplicable joy and irreducible complexity that accompanies simply standing in a place.” (11)

[Andrew Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this chapbook and particularly the way each story and each hand drawn map devolved slightly further, providing a visual check point for the loss, or erasure, being brought to the forefront throughout the storylines.

[Joe Drogos · Rating 4 out of 5]

A slim, elegiac book of meditations on the im/&permanence of memory and place that will inspire you to live more vividly.