IN THE AWAY TIME - Kristen E. Nelson
ABOUT THE BOOK
After two years in an intense relationship that breaks apart, Kristen E. Nelson is left to pick up the pieces. In the absence of her lover, she imagines, she collects impassioned break-up stories from friends, and she writes. In the Away Time is an evocative book of epistolary prose poems that attempt to confront, process, and reanimate the dead relationship over a six-month period of the aftermath. Through time and space, these intimate lyric vignettes construct a lush, immersive, and devastating portrait of queer desire and longing grounded in the specificity of one lived experience.
PRAISE FOR IN THE AWAY TIME
“Spare and scalding, Kristen Nelson’s In the Away Time is a record of, and reckoning with, ruinous love. In the vein of Sophie Calle’s Exquisite Pain, here is an obsessive return to the site of the wound that hurts as much as it heals. In lyric prose, Nelson’s use of the disintegrating refrain embodies the felt sense of loss over time like no other. This very particular queer, gender-fucking heartbreak will be felt and remembered by me and by anyone who has been ‘subsumed into the no one, into the everyone else.’”
—TC Tolbert, author of Gephyromania and The Quiet Practices
“In the Away Time reveals an aching and kaleidoscopic portrait of Queer and tender loss, reminding us that ‘Love exists in pain or right beside it.’ Kristen Nelson masterfully renders the raw and intimate undersides of a deeply feeling and devastating epistolary tapestry. Nelson evokes a rare and vulnerable magic on the page ensuring, ‘you will understand that this is a spell even if you do not understand its intention.’ It's a work that will stay with me for a long while, rising in my chest like a heart murmuration and reminding me to be brave, open, honest, and ultimately, free.”
—Angel Dominguez, author of Desgraciado
“Here it is: the gospel truth about heartache. Kristen E. Nelson crafts the syntax of desire, submerges it in absence, and places it on the altar of the page. And on that altar? Things happen. Lamentations and incantations exchange places. Hunger and grief fuck. I love this book. I love how true it feels regarding the severity that sugars want. Maybe this book is a sort of spell—I can’t stop feeling what was conjured through its repetitions and I want to read it again and again.”
—Selah Saterstrom, author of Ideal Suggestions and Slab
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kristen E. Nelson is a queer writer, performer, and community builder. In addition to In the Away Time, she is the author of the length of this gap (Damaged Goods, August 2018) and two chapbooks: sometimes I gets lost and is grateful for noises in the dark (Dancing Girl, 2017) and Write, Dad (Unthinkable Creatures, 2012). She has published creative and critical writing in Feminist Studies, Bombay Gin, Denver Quarterly, Drunken Boat, Tarpaulin Sky Journal, Trickhouse, and Everyday Genius, among others. Kristen is the founder of Casa Libre en la Solana, a non-profit writing center in Tucson, Arizona, where she worked as the Executive Director for 14 years and the co-founder of Four Queens with Selah Saterstrom. Kristen is currently a Ph.D. student and graduate student instructor at the University of California – Santa Cruz in the Literature Department’s creative/critical writing concentration.
BOOK INFO
Pub Date: April 23, 2024
Print Length: 92 pages
Dimensions: 5 x 8 inches
ISBN: 978-1-957392-29-5