Spare

"Spare is a poetic memoir that weaves personal history with present-day narrative. The text braids recurring epistolary sections, with the fate of a single character, and rediscovered correspondence. This finely tuned lyric memoir includes a meditation on the relationship between the history of eugenics in Maine with the region's current drug epidemic. Internal dialogue considers complex themes of social accountability, privilege, prejudice, socio-economic class, family legacy, and the unreliability of truth. The book's construction ranges from spare to expository, creating its own vocabulary and landscape, both pointillist painting and ballad, treasure hunt and riddle. This revelatory work is by turns mysterious, humorous, and heartbreaking"--