An Arrangement of Skin

In her title essay, Anna Journey tells of how, during the guilt-ridden weeks between her own act of indiscretion and the unthinkable, world-shattering betrayal of her closest friend and mentor, she walked late one night to the twenty-four-hour Kroger to buy a five-dollar egg timer. Back home, she synced the timer’s shrill alarm with the driving snare of The Rolling Stones’ ?Thru and Thru,” and ?smashed the ringing clock with a claw hammer until [she] broke through the white plastic, until there was nothing left to break there at the empty center of the sound.”

Charles Simic once said that the secret wish of all poetry is to stop time. In these essays, Anna Journey succeeds in doing just that. Though the book swerves vertiginously among topics?a Mississippi delta mother’s penchant for telling horrific tales at the dinner table, a linguaphile father’s joke at a Bolivian airport that operates as an unintentional death threat, a stranger’s kindness that takes the form of a thoughtful gift stowed within an armoire’s hidden chamber?each essay demonstrates Journey’s singular ability to hold a moment or action or thought in suspension as she turns it over in the light, revealing from each angle the almost imperceptible connections that bind together and make meaning of a life.

Tracing Journey’s inherited fascination with the arresting realm of the grotesque and the macabre, and informed by her encyclopedic familiarity with the mythic, An Arrangement of Skin is the first collection from an essayist of the highest order.