Ghost at the Loom
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
In this searing and beautiful collection of letters to his vanished — or vanishing — sister, Rider Sonnenreich, a young poet, retrieves memories of wild acts of imagination that once bound his sister Leya and him together.
Rider finds life at the end of the 20th century so alienating that he relentlessly travels and retreats into the imaginary in order to avoid the spectre of adulthood. Retracing the travels of long-dead poets in Southern Europe, Rider seeks Leya, but he is not sure who he will find in the end. He finds himself among other restless cosmopolitans and enigmatic wanderers as he tries to sort the real from the only dreamt. Cotler takes readers on an American odyssey of innocents abroad, through beauty, truth, and the danger our imaginations face in a culture of high-speed popular media.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Colter's lyrical novel is an evocative, complex, and hallucinatory eulogy for reality. Wandering poet Rider Sonnenreich embarks on a surreal quest across Europe and into the human mind struggling to explore borderlands between reality and dream, memory and fantasy, as he searches for his sister Leya. Elegant settings are revealed as spiritual vacuums, as Rider travels Europe in the footsteps of departed poets. As the nature of existence and perception is ruthlessly challenged, so to is logic and the reader's expectations. The result is both frustrating and heartbreaking a haunting novel that plumbs the depths of the human psyche. Colter has written a philosophically rich antinarrative that refuses simplistic interpretation and casts doubt on much that we hold dear.
