Air Salt: A Trauma Mémoire as a Result of the Fall

by Ian Kinney

Overview

Ian Kinney fell seven stories, and he survived. In Air Salt Kinney (un)writes his hospitalization and recovery, using poetry as neuro-rehabilitation. A memoir written by an amnesiac, this collection stitches splintered narratives with projective verse, cutting up and reassembling found text from Get Well Soon Cards, emails between friends, excerpts from personal journals, written records of eye witnesses, the police and EMS reports, relevant Real Estate listings, nurses' charts, doctors' notes, hospital brochures, and Kinney's Neuropsychological Assessment: all increasingly recombinant, all increasingly in chorus. Kinney re-sorts the writing to etch in itself a more essential expression, Air Salt.

A challenging, prototypic piece of posttraumatic writing, Air Salt accommodates narrative discord and juxtaposes heterogenous voices. It reflects the lived experience of trauma, continually (re)arranging distorted phrases, interrogating and (re)forming itself, and (re)fusing to compromise. Air Salt reintegrates a shattered body of local narratives and presses on.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781773851129
Publisher:	University of Calgary Press
Publication date:	11/15/2019
Series:	Brave & Brilliant , #13
Pages:	128
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.35(d)

About the Author

Ian Kinney holds an MA in creative writing from the Department of English, University of Calgary. His work has been short-listed for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. This bisexual settler poet lives in Calgary, and cares for his family’s net-zero homestead on the Kainai territory between Lethbridge and Vulcan, Alberta.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Ian Kinney’s words strain and tug, sever and stretch; they recoil and recuperate. Air Salt is the sting as memories, recollections, and documents split, heal, and become poetic.

—Derek Beaulieu, Calgary Poet Laureate, 2014-2016

This intriguing and subversive collage serves as a collaborative, inter-textual, and living document

—Erina Harris, poet and postdoctoral fellow, University of Alberta

Editorial Reviews

The work’s eccentricity invites rereading, which offers reward—new discovery, new pleasure and connections, and unnerving empathy with the poet, his traumatic fall and the result of his attempt, touched on in the title poem, to "imitate // the sky.”

—Steven Ross Smith,AlbertaViews

From the Publisher