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To Limn/Lying In
Taking its inspiration from the artist Uta Barth’s photographs of the sun as it enters her home and the poet Francis Ponge’s notebooks kept during the German occupation of France, this collection of lyric essays contemplates light as seen through the domestic space and its occupants, predominantly the author’s young children. Meditations on how through light the external world enters into and transforms the private spaces of self and home inextricably link to the author’s writing on life, or the giving of life. These vocabularies weave and tangle while the essays’ forms depict the staccato rhythms of thought and the estrangement of time one experiences when living with children. The essays can be read as standalone pieces, yet build on one another so that patterns emerge, like the obviation of how language serves to illuminate and veil meaning, the repetition of and ekphrastic approach to religious imagery, and the ineffable experience of depression. These essays continually return to the speaker’s admission that the life one gives another is ultimately unsustainable and that despite this catastrophe of living there is the resilience and bewilderment of being together.
- GenresEssays
68 pages, Paperback
First published April 5, 2020
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
December 12, 2025
I'm going to give this a three star. It was a super quick read. Hard to understand at certain times but I think it really did a good job at showing a deep firsthand look into Post Partum Depression, and being able to have love for your child while you silently battle with losing yourself.
May 22, 2023
Mothering & giving voice to illumined things
The words, sentences, and paragraphs—the short essays—in this lovely, brief book straddle worlds. Worlds before and after the arrival of offspring. Worlds of light and things. Of author and reader. Of essay and prose poetry. Dream life and (what we imagine to be?) waking life.
J’Lyn Chapman composed these lyrical pieces before and after becoming a mother. In the room where she sleeps, and where she breastfeeds her children, as in her new identity as a mother, she feels confinement and freedom. And she invites us to join her as she contemplates the multifaceted perplexities she discovers.
Though these essays stand solidly on their own, they are inspired by and echo other works. The first piece, “Firmament: Postpartum Fugue,” reflects on the creation of light and the concept of the firmament in Genesis and other parts of the Hebrew Bible. But it does more than this. In it the author playfully brings the firmament down to earth, as it were, (my metaphor) reflecting on what it means to her and to others—including us!
As Uta Barth did in her book of photographs of the sun shining in her domicile, Chapman documents the ways light enters the room. The ways light falls on objects in the room. Here she is in conversation with Francis Ponge, who, in France under German occupation, wrote prose poems about objects. Like Ponge, she respects the autonomy, the objectivity, of things, which brings her squarely up against the subjectivity of language.
There is thus simultaneously a reveling in and a resistance to the seemingly impossible task of giving utterance, giving voice to the world. I appreciate the generosity of this mother-writer to share her reflections with us.
The words, sentences, and paragraphs—the short essays—in this lovely, brief book straddle worlds. Worlds before and after the arrival of offspring. Worlds of light and things. Of author and reader. Of essay and prose poetry. Dream life and (what we imagine to be?) waking life.
J’Lyn Chapman composed these lyrical pieces before and after becoming a mother. In the room where she sleeps, and where she breastfeeds her children, as in her new identity as a mother, she feels confinement and freedom. And she invites us to join her as she contemplates the multifaceted perplexities she discovers.
Though these essays stand solidly on their own, they are inspired by and echo other works. The first piece, “Firmament: Postpartum Fugue,” reflects on the creation of light and the concept of the firmament in Genesis and other parts of the Hebrew Bible. But it does more than this. In it the author playfully brings the firmament down to earth, as it were, (my metaphor) reflecting on what it means to her and to others—including us!
As Uta Barth did in her book of photographs of the sun shining in her domicile, Chapman documents the ways light enters the room. The ways light falls on objects in the room. Here she is in conversation with Francis Ponge, who, in France under German occupation, wrote prose poems about objects. Like Ponge, she respects the autonomy, the objectivity, of things, which brings her squarely up against the subjectivity of language.
There is thus simultaneously a reveling in and a resistance to the seemingly impossible task of giving utterance, giving voice to the world. I appreciate the generosity of this mother-writer to share her reflections with us.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews