Dyke (geology)

by Sabrina Imbler

Overview

Through intertwined threads of autofiction, lyric science writing, and the tale of a newly queer Hawaiian volcano, Sabrina Imbler delivers a coming out story on a geological time scale. This is a small book that tackles large, wholly human questions— what it means to live and date under white supremacy, to never know if one is loved or fetishized, how to navigate fierce desires and tectonic heartbreak through the rise and eventual eruption of a first queer love.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781625577160
Publisher:	Black Lawrence Press
Publication date:	03/01/2020
Pages:	30
Product dimensions:	(w) x (h) x 0.10(d)

About the Author

Sabrina Imbler is a writer for Defector, a sports and culture site, where they write about creatures and the natural world. Their first full-length book, How Far the Light Reaches, won a 2022 LA Times Book Prize in science and technology. Their chapbook Dyke (geology) was selected for the National Book Foundation's Science + Literature program. Sabrina lives in Brooklyn with their partner, a school of fish, and their two cats, Sesame and Melon.

Editorial Reviews

“Sabrina Imbler’s DYKE (GEOLOGY) is not only gorgeous, it is wildly transformative. It contains sentences that mimic the Earth itself: craggy, pitted, alive. There is so much movement, a momentum that sweeps readers along sentence by sentence. The structures Imbler builds are deeply affecting, deeply moving. The heart of it sits exposed, bare and beating, pulsing and insistent. This writing is very queer, very loving, very painful, very poignant. It is revolutionary work”. —Kristen Arnett, NEW YORK TIMES bestselling author of MOSTLY DEAD THINGS 

“You’ll feel every moment of this book, words twisting, colliding, rooting in the body. With a gentle ferocity that builds from the inside out, I was swept by Imbler’s story of navigation, displacement, and the violent marvels of the natural world.” —T Kira Madden, author of LONG LIVE THE TRIBE OF FATHERLESS GIRLS

“A dazzling work, striking and rich, Imbler’s geology reminds us what it means to be alive.” —Randa Jarrar, award-winning author of A MAP OF HOME and HIM, ME, MUHAMMAD ALI

 “DYKE (GEOLOGY) holds strata of meaning and feeling veined with anger, horniness, and shame, studded with outcrops of facts and nuggets of nerd jokes. All of this together is what makes the sum of Sabrina Imbler’s ranging, folding, stacking sentences an effortful pleasure to traverse, even when they dig down into pain. Like a lasting mythology, Dyke (geology) offers ways to feel through indirection what it’s hard to know head-on. Like good science, it recognizes the mediated ways that power shapes both knowledge and desire, what we’re able to find and what we want to be true. Like any landscape, it repays attention and doesn’t stop at the surface, but lives in the relationships among history and chemistry, the open air and the hot heart of the Earth.” —Kate Schapira, author of HANDBOOK FOR HANDS THAT ALTER AS WE HOLD THEM OUT and TIME TO BE SOMETHING OTHER THAN HUMAN

“Imbler queers the history of the world here—a thrilling summer romance set to geological time, unlike any I know, spanning the globe and the history of humanity and the space between two dyke hearts. Play in the waves of this mind and emerge renewed.” —Alexander Chee, author of EDINBURGH, THE QUEEN OF THE NIGHT, and the essay collection HOW TO WRITE AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOVEL

From the Publisher