This is for the Naming

"This is for the Naming" is a heartwrenching but inspirational story about how a woman deals with her mother's death and the grief that comes with it. Praise for This is for the Naming: In devoting such generous, yet often-piercing lyric attention to these fractured and brilliant narratives of family and body, Dacia Price's essays become acts of "re-naming" the so-called stories of our lives. In Price's world, love, loss, and the heritability thereof are allowed to collide with mice exiled to barren bins of dog food, the inadequacy of psychological manuals, prophetic sparrows and fugitive blueberries. The resulting resonances are unexpected, disarming, and electrically alive.-Matthew Gavin Frank, author of Flight of the Diamond SmugglersThis is a story about choosing and not-choosing, about white capped singing sparrows and malignant tumors, about the ways we are tethered to the ones we love and to our bodies, and how we split apart. "...[I]n an act of defiance," writes Dacia Price in This is for the Naming, "I choose neither." Price spins a gorgeously lyrical web from science, family, and loss, in defiance of the laws of nature, longing for a different ending than the one we all know is inevitable, and driven by that singular human desire: to be seen, to be loved. This is a voice that will buoy you in the darkness.-Rachel May, author of An American Quilt: Unfolding a Story of Family and Slavery