The In-Between State
Description
The essays in The In-Between State forward a compassionate analysis of bodies: queer bodies, bodies of water, bodies that are hated, and bodies that deserve love. Martha Lundin, in fifteen moving essays, attempts to understand the ways in which people try to shape landscapes-how this can be a violent act, even as it seeks to be loving in some ways, and that this violence is not so different from the ways in which queer people shape their bodies to fit in or live outside of a norm.
With essays both personal and progressive, The In-Between State forms a love letter to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and, ultimately, a love letter to Lundin's queer body and queer bodies across the United States.
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About the Author
Reviews
Blending elements of memoir, lyric essay, nature writing, and fractured field guide, Martha Lundin's brilliant new collection accumulates into an incantatory meditation on, and celebration of the queer body, the river's innate meandering, and the sorts of "infinities" that resist the limitations imposed upon them. These essays are full of clear-eyed and intricate declarations of love-for home, for parking lots, for comets and lakes and fish and the Upper Midwest. For bodies bound and unbound. For bodies "that need remembering." Rendered in crisp and sumptuous prose, and grappling toward transcendence, Lundin's work uncovers the beautiful "outliers" lurking amid the ornaments of our world. And in doing so, these essays levitate and whirl, as if miracles.
-Matthew Gavin Frank
author of Flight of the Diamond Smugglers
Martha Lundin's The In-Between State revolutionizes environmental writing, exploring the fluidity of nature and the natural changeable state of bodies of water, from lakes to humans. These lyric essays pulse with the power of Lundin's imagery and insights about the imposition of borders and the spirit that dares to cross them. This collection marks the arrival of a thrilling new voice in American literature.
-May-lee Chai
author of Useful Phrases for Immigrants
American Book Award winner
The In-Between State is about the queerness of bodies, place, and belonging. This is about searching for oneself in the stories we cling to-the ones we attach to neighborhoods, buildings, or trees. Lundin's writing traces Lake Superior and the angles of bodies. Perforating gender into small pockets of the upper-Midwest, they force us into those moments that ping in our chests, those moments we swallow to forget. This is about finding home even when it hurts.
-Zarah Moeggenberg
author of To Waltz on a Pin
