Particulate Matter

Description

In concise and distilled prose, Lemus presents a collection of still lifes, landscapes, and portraits of a challenging year that threatened all she loved most.

"There are only a few words per page in Particulate Matter, but that doesn't actually matter. The words Felicia Luna Lemus does carefully choose serve to paint a brilliant picture of her marriage, of a Los Angeles covered in ash, of dashed hopes and new beginnings."
--Good Morning America

"A love story that's profoundly rooted in the emotional, geographical, and sociopolitical terrain of today...Like song lyrics or snapshots, [Lemus's] wisps and fragments of language take on a coded and otherworldly atmosphere, one that conveys wonder and dread almost subliminally...Particulate Matter is a moving example of how to write about climate change, not didactically, but with the deep impact of both personal loss and literary elegance."
--NPR Books

"In Lemus' first foray into nonfiction, the author chronicles a year in her marriage when the whole world turned upside down. Some pages are brief, containing only one or two words, but their emotional weight, and that of the entire book, packs such a punch readers will feel the sensation long after the end." --Los Angeles Times, 11 books to read during Hispanic Heritage Month

Particulate Matter is the story of a year in Felicia Luna Lemus's marriage when the world turned upside down. It's set in Los Angeles, and it's about love and crisis, loss and grief, the city and the ocean, ancestral ghosts and history haunting. Nature herself seemed to howl. Fires raged and covered the house Lemus and her spouse shared in ash. Everything crystallized. It was the most challenging and terrifying time she had ever experienced, and yet it was also a time when the sublime beauty of the everyday shone through with particular power and presence.