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Wednesday, June 21, 2017

Whiteout is Out

Although the official publication date for Whiteout is July 15th, it's actually available at the University of Chicago Press website NOW (they are distributing it for the University of Alaska, the actual publisher).

For those who don't know about it, here's a description:

Whiteout

64 pages | 6 x 9
When she was a toddler, Jessica Goodfellow’s twenty-two-year-old uncle, along with six other climbers from the 1967 Wilcox Expedition to Denali, was lost in an unprecedented ten-day storm blasting winds of up to three-hundred miles per hour. Just as North America’s highest peak is so massive that it has its own distinct weather system—changeable and perilous, subject to sudden whiteout conditions—a family whose loved one is irretrievably lost has a grief so blinding and vast that it also creates its own capricious internal weather, one that lasts for generations. Whiteout is Goodfellow’s account of growing up in this unnavigable and often unspoken-of climate of bereavement.

Although her poems begin with a missing body, they are not an elegy. Instead, Goodfellow struggles with the absence of cultural ritual for the uncontainable loss of a beloved one whose body is never recovered and whose final story is unknowable. There is no solace here, no possible reconciliation. Instead, Whiteout is a defiant gaze into a storm that engulfs both the wildness of Alaska and of familial mourning.


Thanks so much for your interest and support.


4 comments:

Karen J. Weyant said...

I actually have your book preordered through Amazon (I know that Amazon is evil, but where I live, it's the easiest way to get poetry books). So excited to read this new work!

Jessica Goodfellow said...

Thanks so much for your support, Karen. I completely understand how Amazon is the more convenient way--I live abroad and it's so much easier. The official date is still July 15th, so that's when the hoopla will happen, and you'll be right there in the loop. Thank you!

Karen J. Weyant said...

And I just got an email today saying that your book will be delivered on July 5! Good News!

Jessica Goodfellow said...

Very exciting news, Karen! I hope you enjoy it!