As we isolate, let us reflect. Consider the light through this deeply meditative, intense lyrical collection of essays. To Limn / Lying In by J’Lyn Chapman is our 2019 Nonfiction Book Contest Winner as chosen by Maya Sonenberg.

Taking its inspiration from the artist Uta Barth’s photographs of the sun as it enters her home and the poet Francis Ponge’s notebooks kept during the German occupation of France, this collection of lyric essays contemplates light as seen through the domestic space and its occupants, predominantly the author’s young children. Meditations on how through light the external world enters into and transforms the private spaces of self and home inextricably link to the author’s writing on life, or the giving of life. These vocabularies weave and tangle while the essays’ forms depict the staccato rhythms of thought and the estrangement of time one experiences when living with children. The essays can be read as standalone pieces, yet build on one another so that patterns emerge, like the obviation of how language serves to illuminate and veil meaning, the repetition of and ekphrastic approach to religious imagery, and the ineffable experience of depression. These essays continually return to the speaker’s admission that the life one gives another is ultimately unsustainable and that despite this catastrophe of living there is the resilience and bewilderment of being together. 

“In J’Lyn Chapman’s To Limn/Lying In language becomes a breathing body we live inside even as the book’s heightened finely-tuned intelligence revels in each of its recurrent images (light, pregnancy, babies, mother, mothering, family). Each section, each spin, spirals and expands, connects terms unexpectedly, “emergence” and “emergency” for example idea, bringing them full term, until we are born into a world in which every word, every state of being a woman, is new. ” – Maya Sonenberg

Order To Limn / Lying In HERE