<p>Three years after the sudden, mysterious death of their 1-year-old daughter Lily, Josef Coleman, a high-strung New York surgeon, and his editor wife Claudia Macinnes remain mired in anguish and grief. Their mourning has left them reaching out for different things in different ways: Josef for a primal, physical connection that Claudia can no longer bear, and Claudia for a connection of the soul that Josef has never really known how to offer. To numb his pain and attempt to fill the gaping hole of loss, Josef turns to a young surgical nurse named Kiera; Claudia, meanwhile, is drawn into what seems like an unrequited fantasy about her psychotherapist, Stuart. The time she spends in his office -- this sole "other room" where she can allow herself to project into the future -- becomes a rare bright spot in her weeks. The couple’s extended families soon become implicated in the unraveling of their lives. Bit by bit, haunting pasts and their impact on the present are revealed, as is the chilling truth about Lily’s death. Interwoven with Claudia’s meticulous journal entries offering glimpses of a sunnier future, the story ultimately takes a surprising turn reaffirming that in tragedy’s wake lie redemption, reckoning and peace.</p>

The Other Room

Literature & Fiction

Triedman, Kim

Contemporary

Owl Canyon Press

The stark prose poems of Kim Triedman's HADESTOWN document the dark beauty that emerges from the deepest depths of humanity's underworld. "In his final penitential labor, the Greek hero Heracles descends into the underworld to capture Cerberus, the nether region's three-headed guard dog--the West's primordial pit-bull. In HADESTOWN, her wildly evocative and dazzlingly associative sequence of prose poems, Kim Triedman transforms the hero's descent into a fraught road trip plumbing the cultural, social, and psychological depths. Part mythic quest, part post-apocalyptic travel narrative, HADESTOWN is a palimpsest that overlays traditional storytelling with shadows of immigrant passages and the dire conflicting histories of our own moment. In doing so, she has carried into the light a vision of our contemporary underworld. Euripides meets Blade Runner. Becket meets Survivor."-Daniel Tobin "A gritty gut-punch of a book, HADESTOWN deliberately enervates Herakles' great myth of suffering. Scattering the scraps of what-has-happened, it fixes a red-eyed gaze on a squalid present. Where gods would stride, Kim Triedman gives us skittish know-it-alls. Where the epic would arrive with brazen clarity, this arresting prose poem obfuscates with a menacing, sooty dust. As I read, I was certain that here, the fragmentary is as endangered by a bald coherence as it is by further disintegration; thus, the poet urges we clutch the shards, no matter how they might cut."-Douglas Kearney "Kim Triedman's HADESTOWN is a topographical map of need and satisfaction. To read this book is to embark on a journey and to see the landscape anew...or as Triedman's speaker says, "...we know we've never been here before, that the trip has only just begun. There will be stranger things than kelp." Here is a resilient addition to the tradition of prose poetry."-Jericho Brown

Hadestown

Poetry

WordTech Communications

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Books by Triedman, Kim