Aligning the Glacier's Ghost
Aligning the Glacier's Ghost
Essays on Solitude and Landscape
Rooted in Western Montana, the essays of Aligning the Glacier's Ghost navigate how sense of place intertwines with sense of self, filling geographical and personal in-betweens of identity and illness, memory and story, and intimacy and solitude. This stunning and evocative debut gives shape to those distances, naming them as grief, narrative, and belonging. Capdeville begins the collection with one of many fissures of health, setting the stage for a lush braiding of metaphor, the body, and the natural world. In spanning the space between loss and being lost, Aligning the Glacier's Ghost outlines absence, the evolution of self, and Capdeville's foundation of place in trail work, travel, and early adulthood. Readers will find themselves enmeshed in Capdeville's reflections on how the seen and unseen interconnect to shape an inner world.
'The essays in this gorgeous collection weave a story of geographies--emotional, linguistic, cultural, and intellectual--undergirded by a voice so compelling I could not put it down. . . . Aligning the Glacier's Ghost is a remarkable debut.'--Nathasha Trethewey, author of Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir
These gorgeous essays capture the deep beauty of wildness within and outside of us. The book is a clear-eyed, all-inclusive celebration of what blurs and bores, what freezes, aches, grieves, and soars. Capdeville embraces the whole: glaciers, meadows, rivers, fires, elk, bear, goshawks, and huckleberries. Pickups, parking lots, and operating rooms, too. In Aligning the Glacier's Ghost, all is connected and all is in motion. 'I've panned for silver linings,' Capdeville writes, 'and found only chaos.' What magnificent chaos it is.'--Ana Maria Spagna, author of Pushed: Miners, a Merchant, and (Maybe) a Massacre
Sarah Capdeville is a nonfiction editor for The Hopper and The Changing Times. She lives in Missoula, Montana, where she takes many slow hikes and daydreams about the crosscut saw.
Acknowledgments
Part I. Switchback
1. Carve Away the Moon
2. Exposure
3. Places to Avoid at Dusk
4. Siento
5. Headwater
6. Stories That Hold Water
Part II. Point of Return
7. Porcupine Ridge
8. Different Kinds of Solitude
9. What Stones Hold
10. Cracking the Window
11. Reasons to Carry Bear Spray
12. The Long View
References
