The Rib Joint: A Memoir In Essays

by Julia Koets

Overview

In this collection of linked, lyrical essays, Julia Koets writes, “When you date in secret, the pressure is different. You’re weightless. You’re stuck in between jumping and landing. You exist in midair. Your bones start to thin.” Growing up in a small town in the South, Julia and her childhood best friend Laura know the church as well as they know each other’s bodies—the California-shaped scar on Julia’s right knee, the tapered thinness of Laura’s fingers, the circumference of each other’s ponytails. When Laura’s family moves away in middle school and Julia gets a crush on the new priest’s daughter at their church, Julia starts to more fully realize the consequences of being anything but straight in the South. After college, when Julia and her best friend Kate wait tables at a rib joint in Julia’s hometown, they are forced to face the price of the secrets they’ve kept—from their families, each other, and themselves. From astronaut Sally Ride’s obituary, to a UFO Welcome Center, to a shark tooth collection, to DC Comic’s Gay Ghost, this memoir-in-essays draws from mythology, religion, popular culture, and personal experience to examine how coming out is not a one-time act. At once heartrending and beautiful, The Rib Joint explores how fear and loss can inhabit our bodies and, contrastingly, how naming our desire allows us to feel the heart beating in our chest.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781597096751
Publisher:	Red Hen Press
Publication date:	11/05/2019
Pages:	144
Product dimensions:	4.90(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Julia Koets’s poetry collection, Hold Like Owls (University of South Carolina Press), won the 2011 South Carolina Poetry Book Prize, judged by National Book Award Winner Nikky Finney, and her memoir-in-essays, The Rib Joint (Red Hen Press), won the 2017 Red Hen Press Nonfiction Book Award judged by Mark Doty. Her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Indiana Review, Creative Nonfiction, and the Los Angeles Review. She has an MFA in poetry from the University of South Carolina and a PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Cincinnati. She currently teaches at Clemson University.

https://www.juliakoets.com/

Julia Koets’s poetry collection, Hold Like Owls (University of South Carolina Press), won the 2011 South Carolina Poetry Book Prize, judged by National Book Award Winner Nikky Finney, and her memoir-in-essays, The Rib Joint (Red Hen Press), won the 2017 Red Hen Press Nonfiction Book Award judged by Mark Doty. Her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Indiana Review, Creative Nonfiction, and the Los Angeles Review. She has an MFA in poetry from the University of South Carolina and a PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Cincinnati. She currently teaches at Clemson University.

https://www.juliakoets.com/

Julia Koets’s poetry collection, Hold Like Owls (University of South Carolina Press), won the 2011 South Carolina Poetry Book Prize, judged by National Book Award Winner Nikky Finney, and her memoir-in-essays, The Rib Joint (Red Hen Press), won the 2017 Red Hen Press Nonfiction Book Award judged by Mark Doty. Her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Indiana Review, Creative Nonfiction, and the Los Angeles Review. She has an MFA in poetry from the University of South Carolina and a PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Cincinnati. She currently teaches at Clemson University.

https://www.juliakoets.com/

Julia Koets’s poetry collection, Hold Like Owls (University of South Carolina Press), won the 2011 South Carolina Poetry Book Prize, judged by National Book Award Winner Nikky Finney, and her memoir-in-essays, The Rib Joint (Red Hen Press), won the 2017 Red Hen Press Nonfiction Book Award judged by Mark Doty. Her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Indiana Review, Creative Nonfiction, and the Los Angeles Review. She has an MFA in poetry from the University of South Carolina and a PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Cincinnati. She currently teaches at Clemson University.

https://www.juliakoets.com/

Julia Koets’s poetry collection, Hold Like Owls (University of South Carolina Press), won the 2011 South Carolina Poetry Book Prize, judged by National Book Award Winner Nikky Finney, and her memoir-in-essays, The Rib Joint (Red Hen Press), won the 2017 Red Hen Press Nonfiction Book Award judged by Mark Doty. Her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Indiana Review, Creative Nonfiction, and the Los Angeles Review. She has an MFA in poetry from the University of South Carolina and a PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Cincinnati. She currently teaches at Clemson University.

https://www.juliakoets.com/

Read an Excerpt

Excerpt One

I didn’t have a hard childhood. I grew up in a middle-class household on a tree-lined street in a small town in South Carolina. In elementary school, I walked or rode my bike to school with my three best friends. After school, we biked to the pharmacy in the old town square to buy five-cent bubble gum and fountain cokes. We strolled through the aisles of the yellow pet shop on the corner, seeing how much the cane toad had grown in his aquarium tank since our last visit a few days before. I didn’t get picked on in school. My friends were the kind I could trust. In our backyard, my parents built my brother and me a tree house out of salvaged wood. I took a can of red paint from the shed, and my best friend Laura and I dipped our hands inside, up to our wrists. We pressed our red palms on the inside boards of the tree house so no one would forget us.

Sometimes, though, I felt a void inside me. The space started in my throat when I didn’t voice what I was thinking. When I knew that I couldn’t voice what I was thinking. The void moved down into my trachea, my lungs, my gallbladder until stars started to form in my tissues, my veins. I was glowing with fear. I could only let myself think of a girl I liked, let my thoughts land on her, when no one else was around. I knew in the pit of my bones that when “Sweet Caroline” came on the radio in my mom’s Jeep Cherokee, I should feel ashamed for thinking about a girl I knew.

Growing up, I sat next to my mom on our small screened-in back porch after school and told her about my day, what we’d done in art class, a fight I’d had with my best friend, my doubts about religion. “Doubt isn’t a bad thing,” she always told me.

But I didn’t tell my mom that I might be gay. I thought that if I said the words out loud, I might never be able to take them back. So, I learned how to live in a void until my blood pressure became atmospheric, until my body shook and I couldn’t breathe.

Editorial Reviews

I grew up in the church,” writes Julia Koets, “the way some people grow up in a neighborhood.” And around that sentence, The Rib Joint examines what it means to live inside a structure that both feeds and starves you at once—especially if you’re queer. With radical intuition, Koets thinks about the price of secrets, implying at every turn that love and lies can’t share the same space. A brilliant, unsettling book.

There’s so much to admire in Julia Koets’s first book of essays. She demonstrates enormous skill at turning a subject inside out, revealing clinical interest in that subject while spinning lyrical connections between abstract ideas and detailed memories." —The Gertrude Press

"Engaging, poignant, and at times wryly humorous, this book explores gender and identity through the eyes of a sensitive and perceptive young woman growing up in the South. Julia Koets writes with vulnerability, warmth, and a lyrical style that pulls the reader straight through to the end." — Kristen Iversen, author of Full Body Burden

"The lyric essay form, reliant on gaps and fragmentation, beautifully aligns with Koets’ own experience of compression and expansion, as her narrator moves from a closeted existence to one of self-acceptance and personal liberation. Her memoir demonstrates the profound costs of rejection, silencing, and exclusion within powerful social systems, where love and inclusion often hinge on self-denial." —Magin LaSov Gregg, Brevity's Nonfiction Blog

From the Publisher