Overview
All the Lands We Inherit is a searing, heartbreaking, and formally inventive debut memoir about family, legacy, and identity. The story centers around the increasingly tense relationship between the author and her mother, a deeply religious woman who has become self-isolated and recalcitrant amidst her many crises: failing health, financial woes, and the accumulated effects of long-untreated traumas.
As the lyric vignettes weave back and forth through time, Price investigates the ways that matrilineal legacy have shaped her mother, and how that shaping comes to bear on the author herself. In this deeply personal lyric memoir, the past becomes at once a backdrop and an active force, a thing that underlies everything that happens in the present day. From survival to substance abuse to born again Christianity, the materials of her matriarchs’ lives inform, if not preordain, the realities of the author’s own life. Ultimately, All the Lands We Inherit asks: How much do we owe to those who came before us? And how much of ourselves do we own?
Reviews
"This moving, inventive debut is a meditation on the author's relationship with her mother...Recommended for readers interested in family dynamics, lyric essay, and generational trauma." —Rebecca Brody, Library Journal
"In All the Lands We Inherit, Darby Price’s contemporary recasting of the biblical book, Lamentations, the author offers us a book of hybridity, uneasy with the confines and conventions of a single genre. She weaves lyric to narrative, affliction and misery to compassion and filial love. One might read this book as a sequence of prose poems—compact, bristling with image and insight—or perhaps as a book of prose, novel-like in its complexities, memoir-like as it seeks to unknot the entanglement of memory, while avoiding the easy conclusions of a memorial. At the center of Price’s meditation is the figure of the mother, her mother—a lively, complicated, righteous, and stubborn person—for whom the book is a pre-elegy, a lament that is at times harrowing and at time humorous, a portrait that is at times tender with, at times confounded with, its subject. Across the book’s sixty-six lyric vignettes, Price confronts the burden and blessing that is her mother, a body on its journey from the womb to the grave, a presence that foretells an absence, a severance that calls for lamentation." —Eric Pankey, author of The History of the Siege
"These intimate, vulnerable prose poems provide a unique perspective into the complex story of a daughter and her relationship with her ailing mother. Price has undeniable skill for relaying the white working class experience with accuracy, accountability and grace. Price is a masterful storyteller, writer and artist: this book is compelling and the story lingers with you. You're going to get immediately pulled into this captivating, urgent narrative." --Jose Hernandez Diaz, author of Bad Mexican, Bad American
"Sharp, tender, insightful, and also very funny, Darby Price’s All the Lands We Inherit draws from loss and mourning the bounty of life. I couldn’t stop reading. Each word and anecdote feels meticulously placed. Whether we liken grief to a “sleeping bird or hollow boat,” these poems let us experience both the pain and possibility of loss, how we love a world so much larger than the one we are able to understand. This is a fabulous debut." --Sally Keith, author of Two of EverythingAuthor Biography
Darby Price was born and raised in Southeast Louisiana. She earned her BA at Florida State University and her MFA at George Mason University. Her poetry has appeared in No Contact, Beloit Poetry Journal, RHINO, Redivider, and Zócalo Public Square. Her reviews and interviews have appeared in The Collagist and The Southeast Review. She has taught literature, creative writing, and rhetoric to students from K-12 through college, and has developed curriculum for PEN America, UC Irvine, and WriteGirl Los Angeles. Darby is a Continuing Lecturer at UC Irvine and makes her home in Long Beach, CA.
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