THE BODY IS A TEMPORARY GATHERING PLACING - Andrew Bertaina (preorder)
ABOUT THE BOOK
Andrew Bertaina is going through a mid-life crisis: failed marriage, child-rearing, self-doubt, ennui, the works. Naturally, Bertaina does what any of us would do; he draws inspiration from the poster boy of mid-life crisis chroniclers, the 16th-century essayist Michele de Montaigne, channeling misgivings into meditations, lostness into longing. The essays in The Body Is A Temporary Gathering Place deal with a variety of timeless and universal topics: e.g., how to woo a French woman on a train, male caregiving, how to cannibalize your spouse, and the riddle of time. The essays promise no answers. They do, however, strive to capture the beauty that lingers in a life passing all too quickly.
PRAISE FOR THE BODY IS A TEMPORARY GATHERING PLACE
“The essays in this beautiful book are not only elegant meditations on parenthood, marriage, and the passage of time; they are celebrations of the simple pleasures of life—a first kiss, a quiet morning coffee, the way light fills a room. I was profoundly moved by this collection and by Bertaina’s graceful and unflinchingly honest prose. Here is a writer unafraid to make himself vulnerable on the page, and the result are essays that resonate with authenticity and insight.”
—Andrew Porter, author of The Disappeared
“In The Body Is A Temporary Gathering Place, Andrew Bertaina indulges his ‘near erotic delight’ in digression to bring us a book of quietly transcendent essays. God, cows, trains, ex-lovers, the Bermuda Triangle, 80s movies, the philosophers of ancient Greece, fatherhood, the writing life—it’s all here, the world, in its enormity and specificity. To read these essays is akin to awakening in a train’s sleeping car and looking out at a landscape that overnight has indelibly changed. Who am I now? you ask, turning a page. Who have I been?”
—Steve Edwards, author of Breaking Into the Backcountry
“In The Body Is A Temporary Gathering Place, Andrew Bertaina brings us essays that balance the longing of an outsider with the intimacy of a denizen. As a result, we have a lyric collection that offers up a master class in psychic distance wherein the reader is danced adagio through worlds both dreamy and true. The prose in this debut book of nonfiction is sentient, willing, always, to double back on itself with harder questions or to sit long enough in front of a mirror for meaning to either emerge or erode. And what a feat, to create tension out of intelligence on every page. Bertaina’s wry voice will float you through the uncertainties, his poetry will crack open your heart.”
—Hannah Dela Cruz Abrams, author of The Man Who Danced With Dolls
“Andrew Bertaina’s The Body Is A Temporary Gathering Place is one of those rare, magical books you can open to any page and find a sentence so perfect you won’t stop thinking about it for days. In fewer than two hundred pages, Bertaina takes you on a years-long journey through one man’s thought-life as he enters middle age. It deals with kids, marriage, divorce, art, trains, bathing, and plants. It deals with life and death. It deals with those things, but it’s not about those things. ‘An essay can only be about everything,’ Bertaina says in another one of his perfect sentences. This book is about everything.”
—Mike Nagel, author of Duplex and Culdesac
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Andrew Bertaina is the author of the short story collection One Person Away From You (2021), which won the Moon City Short Fiction Award. He has an MFA from American University in Washington, D.C., where he currently lives with his wife and four children. You can find more of his work at andrewbertaina.com.
BOOK INFO
Pub Date: May 28, 2024
Print Length: 184 pages
Dimensions: 5.5 x 8.5 inches
ISBN: 978-1-957392-30-1