Vanishing Monuments

(Paperback)

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Description

A brilliant novel whose lead character returns home to their long-estranged mother who is now suffering from dementia.

Alani Baum, a non-binary photographer and teacher, hasn't seen their mother since they ran away with their girlfriend when they were seventeen - almost thirty years ago. But when Alani gets a call from a doctor at the assisted living facility where their mother has been for the last five years, they learn that their mother's dementia has worsened and appears to have taken away her ability to speak. As a result, Alani suddenly find themselves running away again - only this time, they're running back to their mother.

Reviews

The real pleasure of reading John Elizabeth Stintzi's book is to see a sensitive mind work through an internal landscape, and to watch them do it with such patience and generosity. --Sara Majka, author of Cities I've Never Lived In

Vanishing Monuments is a beautiful portrait of disassociation at once between countries, family, gender, identities, and, most importantly, 'the distance between ... you and yourself.' An absolute monumental achievement of a first novel. --Joshua Whitehead, author of Jonny Appleseed

Vanishing Monuments is a remarkable novel, a beautiful puzzle of place and belonging, identity and vocation, duty and love. John Elizabeth Stintzi's writing is full of welcome and true surprise - I found myself underlining passages on every page, and then going back to underline more. --John K. Samson, musician and poet

A camera 'takes time and holds it still, ' says the narrator's mother, and reading Vanishing Monuments is like sifting through a darkroom and watching scenes emerge and accrue into an assemblage of life. Memory haunts this novel, at once elusive and inescapable. Like the narrative itself, it loops, layers, seizes, erodes. And John Elizabeth Stintzi conjures it all with a gorgeously queer, off-kilter grace. --Chelsey Johnson, author of Stray City

A surreal, poetic meditation on the struggle to feel at home with the past, family, and one's own body. --Kirkus Reviews

Author Bio

John Elizabeth Stintzi is a non-binary writer who grew up on a cattle farm in northwestern Ontario. They are a recipient of the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers, and their work has appeared in The Malahat Review, Kenyon Review Online, Ploughshares, and in their forthcoming poetry collection Junebat (House of Anansi). They have an MFA in Creative Writing from Stony Brook University in Southampton, NY and currently teach critical and creative writing at the Kansas City Art Institute