A CALENDAR IS A SNAKESKIN - Kristine Langley Mahler
ABOUT THE BOOK
Kristine Langley Mahler is tracking the signs. The year she turns thirty-eight, she keeps finding snakes, bears, ghosts, and ancestors at her doorstep, pointing toward the person she needs to become. As an eclipse approaches, she begins to follow their demands and account for their presence. Clutching the milky quartz she finds in a New Mexican canyon and picking up the pebbles dropped by returning ghosts on her bedroom floor, Mahler excavates personal meaning from astrology, tarot, mothering, siblinging, and homesickness throughout the three connected essays of A Calendar is a Snakeskin, a noctuary of a year marked by the shedding of selves and fears.
PRAISE FOR A Calendar Is A Snakeskin
“A Calendar is a Snakeskin strikes me as a book about the act of reading itself, if shifting ghosts form the letters that cast our words into stories, and if the house that is haunted is the text within. Kristine Langley Mahler’s oracular essays model ways to read the complex world of the living—crowded as it is with relations, joys, difficulties—while providing a light capable of navigating the inner catacombs of memory and uncertainty. Sometimes, this remarkable book reminds, the ghost that wakes us in the night is a guide that knows the secret way to who we are becoming.”
—Selah Saterstrom, author of Ideal Suggestions and Rancher
“Ghosts thread A Calendar Is a Snakeskin like stars pinhole the astrological sky, making a home in time. This book is a talisman of stone, of milk. It dreams and sheds its skin and lights our path beautifully, generously, past the edge of the known.”
—Dennis James Sweeney, author of You’re the Woods Too
“Navigating the animal, mineral, and astrological talismans collected in A Calendar is a Snakeskin is a reminder to hold space for magic and find comfort in the tension and ghosts of our ancestry. Facing the fear of who she really is, as Langley Mahler writes, ‘needs to be met with trust because the universe will bring us into the places we need to face.’ The moon and its eternal pull guides us as does this dreamy book.”
—Megan Culhane Galbraith, author of The Guild of the Infant Saviour: An Adopted Child’s Memory Book
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kristine Langley Mahler is the author of the essay collection Curing Season: Artifacts (West Virginia University Press, 2022). Her work has been supported by the Nebraska Arts Council, named Notable in Best American Essays 2019 and 2021, and published in DIAGRAM, Ninth Letter, Brevity, and Fourth Genre, among other journals. A memoirist experimenting with the truth on the suburban prairie outside Omaha, Nebraska, Kristine is also the director of Split/Lip Press. Find more about her projects at kristinelangleymahler.com or @suburbanprairie.
BOOK INFO
Pub Date: October 31, 2023
Print Length: 120 pages
Dimensions: 5x8”
ISBN: 978-1-957392-22-6