The Field

At its Norse root, haunt, or heimta, means "to lead home." That sense of loss and longing infuses Victoria Garza's profound journey to make sense of a childhood tragedy. Grappling with guilt and trauma through vignettes as sharp and luminous as stained glass, The Field opens a space between memory and dream where angels walk among us and death becomes a door. Garza reminds us it's emotions that matter and that grief is not an affliction, but a deep, abiding expression of love.

-Harrison Candelaria Fletcher, author of Finding Querencia: Essays from In Between

This book is the song of the sister who died by the sister who survived. It is a distillation, a documentary, whose milestones are marked by St. Teresa, Dickinson, Neruda, Dante, the Gospel of Thomas, and The Tibetan Book of the Dead. If you want to know how a family touches grief tenderly and respectfully as loss drills its terror, if you want to know how a ten-year-old confronts darkness, conducts a life, and delivers her heart back to its origins whole-read Garza's testimony, where a simple field in Ohio vibrates with the knowledge that the important matters weed themselves out and one is left with the essential nature of one's love.

-Barbara Cully, author of Desire Reclining, The New Intimacy, and Shoreline Series