Prose, Literature | $17.00
ISBN 13: 978-1-934254-57-8
Size: 8.75″ x 4.75″
Pages: 134
Binding: Softcover, Perfect
Published: May 5, 2015

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 2013 NOS Book Contest Editorial Selection

Memory is a faulty showcase, whether expressed as confession or nostalgia. In Leave Your Body Behind, Sandra Doller forges a new space for remembrance as she actively relives, revives, and revamps her own memories. With anarchic shifts from reverie to citation, from criticism to play, from Madame Bovary in a gold lamé onesie to Bob Dylan hanging out with a side of Science and Memory, Doller feeds us a slush of images and prose that she trusts us to properly mutilate and misconstrue. Construction and demolition become inseparable as we are brought to the realization that the child you were is the one you kill and the person you are now is never the one you once knew. Or did you mishear yourself in the first place?

Praise for Leave Your Body Behind:

Leave Your Body Behind may be a text “in between”—between prose and poetry, between remembering and the present, between the choice words of others and the author’s own insistent inventiveness—but there’s no chiaroscuro here. Sandra Doller’s idiom and rhythm come out swinging, somehow both sly and street fight. Her book contains everything from gossip to wisdom to humor to lament to literary & art criticism to pure, rollicking poetry. It is a seismograph ready and able to take stock of the stakes of being a writing human, a human writing, now.

—Maggie Nelson

Sandra Doller refuses to feed the machine. She improvises, saturates, estranges, flees. Her gaze is everywhere and unabashed. An ecstatic. She is a synthesizer of the highest order, a wizard of the slipping-off word.

—Noy Holland

Leave Your Body Behind is a beautiful cyborg of a book with lipstick dripping out of the wrong orifice, which is a problem. What is solid in this book becomes, more quickly than our ability to process such things, liquid, autonomous, real.

—Bhanu Kapil

Is it a novel? A memoir? A poem? A book of aphorisms that liberate the words from their contexts but because there is no way two words can come close to each other, hold hands with each other, without becoming part of each other, maybe its a novel after all, a memoir about memoir, a story about story, or maybe its a mystery about the fluidity of words and the memory of words disappearing from and into themselves, only to reappear again as new memories and old friends and sometimes lovers.

—Eleanor Antin