A Limbo of Shards: Essays on Memory Myth and Metaphor

A "Limbo of Shards" is a provocative collection of essays that continue Professor Slattery's examination of the image of the wound in the fleshing of psychological life beyond the wounded body of our broken metaphors and their unnamed futures.

From essays such as "Poetry's Mode of Knowing: Dante's Pilgrimage From Mimesis To Wisdom 2006" and "Eros and Psyche: The Rite To Wound and the Swelling of Consciousness 2003" to "The True Terror of Terrorism 2002" the author guides me in rethinking my imaginal and transitional space which lay metaphorically "at the midpoint of my life." It is here the collective and poetic basis in mind is communal. It is here my own poetic thought will recreate and re-emerge in conscious living.

So it is here to a kind of limbo these essays escort me. What I am to do here is re-member, re-vision and re-vise my memories, mythic images and metaphors. Here's what happened throughout "me" as I did.

I imagined as I read these essays, the author in each essay, indeed, made such an attempt. I also found each essay generous in its own re-visioning statements. Re-imagining I re-pictured this word-terrain of shards like a great cut-work design. "A Limbo of Shards" helped me rediscover a certain voice, a voice of presentness and with it, a power that differenced my sense of aliveness and distinguished that from my general life situation. This collection of essays is powerful reading!

Stephanie Pope