Study in Perfect

Study in Perfect is an exploration of perfection. In “Moving Horizontal” a Victorian house loses its charm over time, especially when compared to a modernist contemporary filled with light. Family life is dense with pleasure, as in the perfect vacation described in “Marking Time in Door County,” and in “Neriage, or What Is the Secret of a Long Marriage,” where an ancient Japanese ceramic technique has much in common with shaping a close relationship. There is such a thing as a perfect cup of tea, depending on who is preparing and drinking it (“Perfect Tea”). And schmaltzy show tunes flowing from a black-lacquered piano in a Chinese restaurant can be genuinely moving (“Sentimental à la Carte”).
Naturally, Gorham must embrace imperfection. The poisonous mushrooms in “Darling Amanita” lead to a consideration of our darker impulses, like obsessive love, even murder. And there is pain: “The Shape of Fear” relates the story of a child stricken with a deadly staph infection, as it considers the function and form of fear. And alcoholism, the family disease no one wants to talk about, is poised against The Cat in the Hat, a story everyone has read and enjoyed.
Study in Perfect winds its way around and through the many permutations of this most hermetic and exalted concept and proceeds with the full consciousness that perfection’s exact definition is subjective, reliant on who is speaking, and easily unmoored by time, geography, and the vagaries of taste.

Study in Perfect (The Sue William Silverman Prize for Creative Nonfiction Ser.)

Literature & Fiction

Gorham, Sarah

Essays & Correspondence

University of Georgia Press

Sarah Gorham recounts her childhood education as a rebellious, insecure, angry girl shipped overseas to a tiny international school perched on a mountain shelf in Bernese-Oberland, Switzerland. There, boot camp style, she experienced deprivation, acute embarrassment, and keen educational guidance, all in the name of growing up. The Swiss landscape influenced her with its paradoxes: unforgiving slopes and peaks; government-controlled hills and valleys―so, too, the languages she’s obliged to learn: one ruffian, the other militaristic.
Though her stay lasted a mere two years, her time there was so crucial in her transition to adulthood that she returns to those years decades later, each and every night in memory and dream. There are brief forays into the science of surviving an avalanche; Sherlock Holmes’s faked demise at the Reichenbach Falls; the origins of meringue; and the history of homesickness and its spiritual twin, Sehnsucht. In her travels Gorham tracks an adolescent experience both agonizingly familiar and curiously exotic.

Alpine Apprentice (Crux: The Georgia Series in Literary Nonfiction Ser.)

Study in Perfect is an exploration of perfection. In “Moving Horizontal” a Victorian house loses its charm over time, especially when compared to a modernist contemporary filled with light. Family life is dense with pleasure, as in the perfect vacation described in “Marking Time in Door County,” and in “Neriage, or What Is the Secret of a Long Marriage,” where an ancient Japanese ceramic technique has much in common with shaping a close relationship. There is such a thing as a perfect cup of tea, depending on who is preparing and drinking it (“Perfect Tea”). And schmaltzy show tunes flowing from a black-lacquered piano in a Chinese restaurant can be genuinely moving (“Sentimental à la Carte”).Naturally, Gorham must embrace imperfection. The poisonous mushrooms in “Darling Amanita” lead to a consideration of our darker impulses, like obsessive love, even murder. And there is pain: “The Shape of Fear” relates the story of a child stricken with a deadly staph infection, as it considers the function and form of fear. And alcoholism, the family disease no one wants to talk about, is poised against The Cat in the Hat, a story everyone has read and enjoyed.Study in Perfect winds its way around and through the many permutations of this most hermetic and exalted concept and proceeds with the full consciousness that perfection’s exact definition is subjective, reliant on who is speaking, and easily unmoored by time, geography, and the vagaries of taste.

Self-Help

Personal Transformation

Poetry, co-winner of Four Way Books Award Series

The Tension Zone

Poetry

Four Way Books

In The Cure, Sarah Gorham’s mature, eager, intelligent poetic voice explores family―and marriage; and self―as forms in which we move, escaping and demanding restraint, seeking and fearing contact with each other. The book moves toward and away from a riveting sequence, "The Family Afterward," that examines the intrusions and heartbreaks, complicities and narrowings of definition, that are forced upon the family members of an alcoholic. Gorham is interested in appetite: for drink, for sex, for oblivion, for comfort. The paradoxes she most thrillingly defines are the tightest ones, degrees and atmospheres apart. The Cure is both accessible and intimate; sometimes funny, sometimes desolate. Gorham describes a hike, the hiker coming upon a limestone cross, surrounded by the tchotchke-mementos of previous passers-by. She is flooded, but trusts the surprise of her emotion: "Very moving these rookie prayers/ This unmajestic gratitude." It’s that delectable sensibility, the pause that yields finely tuned appreciation, that marks Gorham’s vision, her cupped ear listening to the world.

The Cure

Bad Daughter explores misbehavior―its risky pleasures and often tragic consequences―through poems about “bad” daughters, sisters, and their mothers. What happens to the sister who obeys? What if a daughter refuses her inheritance? Can she? What sanctuary and what limits do worship and domesticity provide? Gorham adopts several lyric forms―‘morality tales,’ ironic prayers, scaled-down sonnets, sharp meditations on concepts such as envy, detachment, and immortality―to show that the self as forged by generations of women and girls is both subversive and enduring.

Bad Daughter

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Gorham, Sarah. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Gorham, Sarah

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Gorham, Sarah. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Study in Perfect (The Sue William Silverman Prize for Creative Nonfiction Ser.)

Alpine Apprentice (Crux: The Georgia Series in Literary Nonfiction Ser.)

Study in Perfect (The Sue William Silverman Prize for Creative Nonfiction Ser.)

The Tension Zone

The Cure

Bad Daughter