AUDIOBOOK
About
A remarkable debut that explores the imperfect ways we care for one another, and how we seek repair when care fails."What's our obligation to each other?" asks Jennifer Eli Bowen in this propulsive exploration of community, solitude, and love. Drawing on her experiences as a mother, daughter, and founder of the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, the country's largest and most enduring prison-based literary organization, she examines the wild spectrum of shapes that care can take. She investigates the role of community across the world and in her own neighborhood, driven by a curiosity to uncover what might be gleaned from various vanishments in her own life: the shadow of her father, disappeared backyard chickens, a Moleskine notebook that passes in and out of her Little Free Library.Tracing both connection and its lack, Bowen uncovers what happens when it's missing, how we find it, and how it heals individuals, communities, and systems-from the incarcerated caretakers of newborn foals in Norway to the time-bending drama of watching children grow into adults. And through this winding quest to understand love, she moves readers out of their complacency not only about the state of American incarceration, but about what we owe ourselves and society.Unflinching, vulnerable, and surprisingly funny, The Book of Kin encourages us not to abandon each other, reminding us that "harm is shared, and healing is too."
"The Book of Kin is an expansive experience, one that, I believe, will be appreciated for its searing and always-seeking approach to tackling large emotions, to wring the secondary colors out of the grander, primary feelings. This book is beautiful, brave, and inventive."
"This work is an exploration of memory and grief, of incarceration and disappointment. It is a record of finding oneself within the ebb and flow and sometimes utter stillness of life. More than a meditation, this is a loving expression of one woman's labor to find clarity alongside us and even on behalf of us. If you listen closely, this is music that sings our lives."
"The Book of Kin is an expansive experience, one that, I believe, will be appreciated for its searing and always-seeking approach to tackling large emotions, to wring the secondary colors out of the grander, primary feelings. This book is beautiful, brave, and inventive."
"This work is an exploration of memory and grief, of incarceration and disappointment. It is a record of finding oneself within the ebb and flow and sometimes utter stillness of life. More than a meditation, this is a loving expression of one woman's labor to find clarity alongside us and even on behalf of us. If you listen closely, this is music that sings our lives."