Recenses/Recencies: Essays

How often are we told that time will provide the emotional distance we need to comprehend what has happened to us? How often do we encounter the claim that as the weeks, months, and years pass we will achieve greater clarity? In this searching, playful collection, Patrick Madden gives the lie to such easy consolations. Through a simple conceit, that each essay begins with the phrase “I have just . . . ,” Madden examines recent experiences, reaching for unexpected associations to generate linguistically artful and narratively subversive essays. A comment overheard in a parking lot, a near-tragic incident off the coast of Uruguay, a jaunty whistle sung by an unseen bird―each of these “recenses,” as Madden calls them, reveals how we use language to contain, refract, elide, and re-create, and how we are constantly revising and rewriting the past. Through this journey into how we construct our personal histories, Madden reveals the surprising pleasure, and occasional painful truth, of never really knowing.