Disequilibria: Meditations on Missingness

by Robert Lunday

Overview

Winner of the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize

Disequilibria: Meditations on Missingness is a hybrid memoir that recounts the 1982 disappearance of the author's stepfather, James Edward Lewis, a pilot and Vietnam veteran. Recounting his family's experiences in searching for answers, Lunday interrogates the broader cultural and conceptual responses to the phenomenon of missingness by connecting his stepfather's case to other true-life disappearances as well as those portrayed in fiction, poetry, and film. In doing so Disequilibria explores the transience in modern life, considering the military-dependent experience, the corrosive effects of war, and the struggle to find closure and comfort as time goes by without answers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780826364678
Publisher:	University of New Mexico Press
Publication date:	02/15/2023
Series:	River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Robert Lunday is a professor of English at Houston Community College. He is also author of Mad Flights and Gnome.

Table of Contents

Finding; Understanding
Doubles
Oracles
Relics
The Asymptote
Parallax
Nomads and Exiles
In the Cloud
The Middle Distance
Face of Shadows
Uroboros
The Sun and I
Hitchhike
Sayaboury
I Am the Grass
The Boy Scout Handbook
Circles
The Verge
Vita Activa
Disequilibria
A Beautiful Death
China
The Swerve
A Feral Presence
Dark Heart
The Vortex
Flitcraft's Folly
Wakefields
The Circumambient Self
Subterranean
Spirit Radios
Lightness
Foolish Dreams
Old Soldiers Never Die
Worldness
Flying on Fumes
July 3, 1969
The Edge
Desert Dreams
The Return

Acknowledgments
Notes

Editorial Reviews

01/02/2023

In this ruminative memoir, Lunday (Gnome) reflects on the disappearance of his stepfather. “A funeral offers release, but vanishing has a life of its own,” Lunday contends, weaving together recollections, letters, and literary analysis to contemplate the nature of loss and how losing his stepfather affected him. James Edward Lewis, Lunday writes, left their home in Fayetteville, N.C., one morning in 1982 and hasn’t been heard from since. The author embraces a fragmentary style that reflects his efforts to sort through the clues about Lewis’s fate, as when Lunday unpacks Philip Larkin’s poem “Poetry of Departures” and proposes that “escape is being true to oneself” before noting the distinction made by British geographer Hester Parr between looking (“living your life with an ear open”) and searching (the “no-stone-unturned effort” after something disappears), refraining from explicit analysis and leaving readers to come up with their own takeaways. Letters written to Lunday’s mother by Lewis while he served in Vietnam add pathos, underscoring his love for her and the harrowing combat he lived through. The elliptical prose won’t be for everyone, but the author’s account of learning to live with uncertainty is nonetheless moving. The result is an elegiac if sometimes oblique examination of loss. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

"Elliptical prose . . .moving . . .elegiac."—Publishers Weekly

"With its arresting catalogue of anecdotes and passages illustrating missingness, Disequilibria captures what it's like to become obsessed with a mystery, as well as what it feels like to get trapped in its labyrinth. But most compellingly, it teaches us that if the grief-stricken can't find out the truth, they can attain solace in the still-present love for those who are gone."—Rigoberto González, author of Abuela in Shadow, Abuela in Light

"This haunting, engrossing, superbly written memoir is full of revelations and mysteries: a kind of prose epic of the missing. Chockful of Americana, it is also marbled with uncanny literary references: Robert Lunday seems to have read everything and put it to good use. His intelligence makes this book shine."—Phillip Lopate, author of A Mother's Tale

From the Publisher