Unearthingly by Julian Mithra
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ISBN - 978-1-7343065-6-9
Fiction: hybrid, experimental, collage, archives, girlhood
Grab a shovel and start digging. Downward is backward. Here, humans document their meaning-making through textbook, advice column, archeology report, mining assessment, and survey, casting the underground as a resource to be capitalized upon. But silenced subjects, from minerals to moles, whisper their objections to colonizing technologies. An imaginary assemblage, Unearthingly ultimately trusts a young chicanx tomboy to sort through these archives of a boom-n-bust, would-be ghost town by venturing beneath the surface and recording her survival in an atlas of poems. In allying with long-dead companions, she excavates personal and collective memory to protect the occult.
Adverbially. One can reconstruct science, history. Subject them to the same crumbling underground passage. Strip a girl of her language, her name, transform her into a bear. In Unearthingly, Julian Mithra engages a dizzying array of literary forms to construct a poetic documentation of violence, nationalism, environmental devastation read primarily through the eyes of Cheeky and the unstoppable arc of her girlhood. It is a book you will read from beginning to end and then back again. As if emerging from a tunnel only to find oneself shimmying back in again to press against the variegated textures of this metallurgic world.
- Aja Couchois Duncan, author of Vestigial and Restless Continent (winner of the 2016 California Book Award)
Unearthingly resembles a spoonful of sand laid out under a microscope — how multifarious and unique the small shards can be. Julian Mithra assembles a mosaicked story with fragments of an imaginary archive where rocks speak as freely as people. Mithra guides the reader through this conjured underworld, whose darkness and obscurity ultimately rouse all the other senses.
- Sabrina Imbler, author of Dyke (geology)
- Aja Couchois Duncan, author of Vestigial and Restless Continent (winner of the 2016 California Book Award)
Unearthingly resembles a spoonful of sand laid out under a microscope — how multifarious and unique the small shards can be. Julian Mithra assembles a mosaicked story with fragments of an imaginary archive where rocks speak as freely as people. Mithra guides the reader through this conjured underworld, whose darkness and obscurity ultimately rouse all the other senses.
- Sabrina Imbler, author of Dyke (geology)
PRESS
- Review in Glassworks
- Review in Big Other
- Playlist at Large-Hearted Boy
- Review in Porter House Review
- Interview at Fizza Writes
- Review in Glassworks
- Review in Big Other
- Playlist at Large-Hearted Boy
- Review in Porter House Review
- Interview at Fizza Writes