Like many writers, I feel centered when I write, or it might be better to say, when I don’t write, when I can’t write for whatever reason, I feel, frankly, de-stabilized. It’s dangerous for me not to write.
—
Sigrid Nunez
Melanie Rae Thon: First, Body by Suzan Sheman
Part of the Editor's Choice series.
- Stellan Skarsgård by Larry Gross
- Aharon Appelfeld by Thomas Thornton
- Eric Kraft by Frederic Tuten
- Richard Powers by Sven Birkerts
- Jesús “Chucho” Valdés by Zoë Anglesey
- Lou Reed by Tim Nye
- Tracey Moffatt by Coco Fusco
- Maurice Berger and Patricia Williams
Interviews
- Amy Adler by Linda Yablonsky
- Charles Hagen by Ann Lauterbach
Artists on Artists
- Two Poems by Brent Hendricks
- Ghost Writing by Charlie Smith
- Two Poems by Cynthia Atkins
- Two Flowers: An Inca Tale by Gabriella De Ferrari
- Days and Nights in Manila by Luis Francia
- ’70s Slight Return from Pink Instrument by Max Blagg & Ralph Gibson
- The Bear by Rick Bass
- Wes Mills
- Yayoi Kusama by Mimi Thompson
First Proof
- Inka Essenhigh by Grady T. Turner
- Ravi Coltrane’s Moving Pictures by Zoë Anglesey
- Stewart Wallace & Michael Korie’s Harvey Milk by Bruce Bauman
- Rolf Belgum’s Driver 23 at New York Underground Film Festival by David Schulz
- Lars Von Trier: The Kingdom II by Maria Mackinney
- John Lurie: Fishing with John by Glenn O'Brien
- Danny Hoch’s Jails, Hospitals, and Hip Hop by Mark Magill
- Vincent Gallo’s Buffalo 66 by Bette Gordon
- Pierre Clastres’s The Chronicles of the Guayaki Indians, translated by Paul Auster by Calvin Reid
- Sara Chin’s Below the Line by Lawrence Chua
- Melanie Rae Thon: First, Body by Suzan Sheman
- Nuruddin Farah’s Secrets by Rone Shavers
- Glenn O’Brien’s Soapbox, essays, diatribes, homilies and screeds by Betsy Sussler
- Rubem Fonseca’s Vast Emotions and Imperfect Thoughts translated by Clifford Landers by Minna Proctor
Editor's Choice
- Éduoard Glissant’s The Last of the African Kings and Maryse Condé’s Poetics of Relation by Caryl Phillips
- The Yale Younger Poets Anthology: Open to Any American Writer Under Forty by Thomas Bolt
- Joan Murray by Thomas Bolt
- Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence by Jennifer Berman
More
Melanie Rae Thon.
Melanie Rae Thon’s masterful collection of short stories, is a testament to the struggling voices of runaways, drug addicts, and alcoholics. Thon’s characters’ attempts to live outside the law, those written and unwritten, and their often misguided desires inevitably lead to disaster. Women are deemed dangerous because they are sexual, and passion is consistently laced with impending male violence; a boy’s knife, a father’s wrath. In “Little White Sister” Thon writes convincingly in the voice of a black man, in jail for his white girlfriend’s drug habit. In “Necessary Angels” Thon shifts points of view to a white girl pregnant with a black man’s child—and after the abortion—winds up unconscious in an unhinged refrigerator. In “Xmas, Jamaica Plain” two runaways break into a house, and for a brief moment are the privileged, sucking down ice cream, fondling strands of pearls, until one commits suicide.
Thon’s characters are obsessed with the fragility and inadequacy of the body; whether working in an emergency room or a morgue, collecting blood, taking urine, skinning rabbits, slaughtering cattle, killing soldiers in Vietnam, hustling, or observing a parent’s slow death. Interestingly enough, what most of these characters desire is to forget, first their bodies and the rest will follow. They hide by going inside another, “the place that is yourself and not yourself,” willingly or unwillingly, whether it be a man inside a woman, a boy in the skin of a reindeer, or a man wedged underneath a cadaver. “Climb inside me—wear my body like a coat,” though the flesh offers not much more than a brief escape. The language in First, Bodyis rich and well-crafted, the first person voices strong and unflinching, as though it’s the first time these characters have used words as a means of expression. In the process of testifying, the cages have swung open, demons have been unleashed. They fly up from the page to the reader, who is in awe.
—Suzan Sherman
First, Body was published by Houghton Mifflin.
First, Body was published by Houghton Mifflin.
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Originally published in
BOMB 64,
Summer 1998
Featuring interviews with Tracey Moffatt, Aharon Appelfeld, Eric Kraft, Maurice Berger, Patricia Williams, Richard Powers, Stellan Skarsgard, Jesus “Chucho” Valdes, and Lou Reed.
