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Formats
Paperback Details
  • 10/2016
  • 978-1-945366-88-8
  • 144 pages
  • $12.00
Meia Geddes
Author
Love Letters to the World
Meia Geddes, author

Adult; Poetry; (Publish)

This is an exercise in love, an attempt at developing taste, a test of how sweet a word can be, an ode to moments. This is a manifestation of slowness and quiet and sunshine, early mornings and late evenings, glad memories and slender times. This is yearning and giving, an extended meditation on letters, what they can and cannot do for one's being. Meia Geddes’ debut LOVE LETTERS TO THE WORLD—a series of 120 brief, lyrical missives—addresses the world as body, concept, stranger. This is a quiet celebration and exploration of life, love, language, and one's place in the world.

Reviews
In this diary-like and occasionally twee collection, Geddes hews closely to her title as she addresses an extensive series of epistles to her “dear world.” She embarks on a personal inquiry into how to continue a loving relationship with the world and how to be at home in it: “I wonder if one can make one’s life into a series of projects. I wonder if finding a home within oneself is enough.” Geddes is not concerned with economy of language, nor does she engage in much wordplay or linguistic invention. Her lengthy questions and explications of quotidian discoveries read more as a spiritual exercise or meditation on the intricacies of being human. What saves this book from being too vague or sentimental is Geddes’s questioning of personal and ethnic identity. She discusses her own identity as an adopted Chinese-American: “I found a box of little Chinese clothes in my old closet,” Geddes writes. “The clothes used to fit a girl with a different name, a girl with flaming cheeks.” The work could have benefitted from some trimming, but Geddes succeeds in conveying some deeply personal reflections, “a memoir of all the humdrum and intrigue.” (BookLife)
Boston Literary Magazine

"Geddes' poems are lyrical, rhythmic, and gentle whether the subject is love, adoption, or a meditation on a box of little Chinese clothes discovered in a closet. Throughout the diversity of subject and perception, there is grace in Geddes' voice as she leads us on a journey. Who is the dear world with whom she corresponds? The reader can look between the words to find their resolution."

George Genovese, author of Love Letters to the World

"In this work, those essentially human qualities, thinking and feeling, are cast in such elusively supple and subtle language, at once clear and unpretentious, and yet nuanced and rich in refraction, that what appears translucently simple and immediately appropriable suddenly diffuses into shades of signification for which one is never quite prepared . . . It is refreshing to encounter a work of genuine intimacy—to say nothing of its humanity—that is challenging in its emotional honesty but which steers well clear of self-indulgent sentimentality, just as it is to encounter one that is intelligent, even wise, but remains unfettered by a labored intellectuality."

Jennifer Tseng, author of Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness

"Meia Geddes' letters to the world are like paper cranes she has made to save someone. To read them is to touch a bird in flight, to experience a growing proximity to possibility as it flies toward you."

Timothy Gager, author of The Shutting Door

"Meia Geddes presents a love letter to the world and its beautiful, brave words without inhibitions, speaking to us with complete vulnerability. It's an intimate metamorphosis when the reader becomes the world and Meia speaks to our souls."

Formats
Paperback Details
  • 10/2016
  • 978-1-945366-88-8
  • 144 pages
  • $12.00
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