Lyric and associative, Speculative Histories explores what it means to be whole.
Praise for Speculative Histories
“When memory fails, what can take its place? Speculation, Brigitte Lewis suggests, other ways of knowing: myth, history, science. Imagination. The quicksilver of language itself. The result is a memoir about what it means to re-member a life. Hybrid in form and lyrical in style, Speculative Histories is driven by an authentic voice and singular intelligence. This is a mind on the page, a story unfolding. To read it is to fall in love with what writing can do.”
— Beth Alvarado, author of Jillian in the Borderlands and Anxious Attachments
“Reading Speculative Histories, I am already thinking how, Persephone-like, I might navigate on the regular between the syntactical landscape and lyric depths of these essays—how I might be made golden, again and again, by Brigitte Lewis’ prose. In these essays, revelation does not so much lift the veil as re-spin it from rock and soot and blue, blue water. In these essays, a hole is both absence and substantive, the thing that made it, an opening created by fire (of wood, of neurons, of explosives) or by pick, by carve; or they are a derelict chimney swarming with roses, a snow cave, the blue interior of a balloon, an accommodation of/for breath. I am “highly contaminated by the swoon” of this incandescent work.”
— Irene Cooper, author of Found and Committal