Speculative Histories
Memoir in Essay
JackLeg Press, 2024
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“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
Origin Stories
Short Story Collection
Iron Horse, 2020
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“How do we escape the cyclical haunting of ancient structures? What battle was waged between the feminine and masculine that still causes the earth to quake and split? In these oddly brave shorts, I am suspended between a familiar tale and its search for a new exegesis––that is the permission to transform a poison into medicine we may drink on the sly. Not in order to survive but in order to remember “violence is what happens when we don’t know what to do with our suffering.” Exquisite storytelling inside the eye of poetry.”—Yanara Friedland, author of Uncountry: A Mythology and Abraq ad Habra: I will Create As I Speak
“You’ll imagine this, won’t you – Lilith leaning forward to recite something atomic, vivid, sudden, poetic.” So ends Origin Stories, on a note that makes you want to return to the beginning and read again. Brigitte Lewis restores lust, love, physics, and honey to Biblical couplings, making mythic characters utterly new and deeply human. This is a smart debut, as innovative as it is irreverent.”—Beth Alvarado, author of Jillian in the Borderlands and Anxious Attachments
“In the stories of Brigitte Lewis the sacred and the profane refuse tidy categories and instead erupt into messy, humorous, and profound elucidations about what it means to be in a body that loves other bodies. Here are stories that work like alchemy works—the mythical past and the uncertain present conjunct in an invitation to see ourselves anew.”—Selah Saterstrom, author of Ideal Suggestions and Slab.