Bøger af Joanna Pearson

In the tradition of Notes on an Execution and I Have Some Questions for You, an enthralling, wire-taut debut about an unsolved murder on a college campus and its aftermath twenty years later.Days after the dawn of Y2K, beautiful, charismatic twenty-year-old Karlie Richards is found brutally murdered in her campus apartment. Two decades later, those who knew Karlie-and those who just knew of her- remain consumed by her death. Among them is her freshman year roommate Joy, now middle aged and mid-divorce, living in the same college town and desperate for a new beginning. When she stumbles upon a 20-year-old letter from Karlie, Joy becomes convinced the man in prison for her murder was wrongfully convicted. Soon she is diving deep into the dark world of Internet conspiracy theorists and amateur sleuth blogs and bouncing off others touched by the long, sensational aftermath of this crime. They include KC, the trans, constantly harassed night manager at the building where Karlie was killed; Sheri, the mother of the intellectually disabled man serving time; and Jacob Hendrix, the charming professor with whom, Joy knows all too well, Karlie was romantically entangled before her death.Jumping between 2019 and 1999, Bright and Tender Dark takes us from the era of Reddit threads and online obsession to the evangelism-infused culture of the late 90s to reveal what really happened to Karlie. It is a compulsively readable, prismatic literary mystery that brilliantly mines the mythology of murder, the power of urban legend, and the psychological urge to both protect and exploit what you love but cannot have.

The precise gaze and chiseled language of the poems in Oldest Mortal Myth authoritatively convey a broad and deep knowledge. Whether a reimagining a Greek myth in order to infuse it with a contemporary pain, extending empathy and humorous Mitmenschkeit to both denizens and voyeurs of the world's freakshows, or describing with wit and experience the spiritual affects of medical conditions, the book is infused with restrained but piercing emotion, a subtle metrical ear, and enough daring and wit to write in rhymed couplets to take the obvious, easy way. For instance, with the last line of "De Wallen, Amsterdam": "The moon above the spires, a sexless disk,/eyes us coolly as an odalisque." I so admire the refusal to make that last line scan as a perfect iambic pentameter line. It would be so easy; all you'd have to do is add the grammatical, but colloquial, "as." Which would have ruined the line, and the poem. Oh, and the rhymes in the canzone! There's much to admire here, much to enjoy.-Marilyn Nelson

The precise gaze and chiseled language of the poems in Oldest Mortal Myth authoritatively convey a broad and deep knowledge. Whether a reimagining a Greek myth in order to infuse it with a contemporary pain, extending empathy and humorous Mitmenschkeit to both denizens and voyeurs of the world's freakshows, or describing with wit and experience the spiritual affects of medical conditions, the book is infused with restrained but piercing emotion, a subtle metrical ear, and enough daring and wit to write in rhymed couplets to take the obvious, easy way. For instance, with the last line of "De Wallen, Amsterdam": "The moon above the spires, a sexless disk,/eyes us coolly as an odalisque." I so admire the refusal to make that last line scan as a perfect iambic pentameter line. It would be so easy; all you'd have to do is add the grammatical, but colloquial, "as." Which would have ruined the line, and the poem. Oh, and the rhymes in the canzone! There's much to admire here, much to enjoy.-Marilyn Nelson