I had a brother once : a poem, a memoir / Adam Mansbach.
Material type: TextPublisher: New York : One World, [2021]Copyright date: ©2021Edition: First editionDescription: 170 pages ; 22 cmContent type:- text
- unmediated
- volume
- 9780593134795
- 0593134796
Item type | Home library | Collection | Call number | Materials specified | Status | Date due | Barcode | Item holds | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Adult Book | Dr. James Carlson Library | NonFiction | 811.6 M286 | Available | 33111009805421 | ||||
Adult Book | Main Library | NonFiction | 811.6 M286 | Available | 33111010505168 | ||||
Adult Book | Northport Library | NonFiction | 811.6 M286 | Available | 33111009842622 |
Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:
A brilliant, genre-defying work-both memoir and epic poem-about the struggle for wisdom, grace, and ritual in the face of unspeakable loss
"A bruised and brave love letter from a brother right here to a brother now gone... a soaring, unblinking gaze into the meaning of life itself."-Marlon James, author of Black Leopard, Red Wolf
my father said
david has taken his own life
Adam is in the middle of his own busy life, and approaching a career high in the form of a #1 New York Times bestselling book-when these words from his father open a chasm beneath his feet. I Had a Brother Once is the story of everything that comes after. In the shadow of David's inexplicable death, Adam is forced to re-remember a brother he thought he knew and to reckon with a ghost, confronting his unsettled family history, his distant relationship with tradition and faith, and his desperate need to understand an event that always slides just out of his grasp. This is an expansive and deeply thoughtful poetic meditation on loss and a raw, darkly funny, human story of trying to create a ritual-of remembrance, mourning, forgiveness, and acceptance-where once there was a life.
"Adam Mansbach--a young and mostly unknown jazz musician, rapper, poet, screenwriter, and novelist - had just had his first brush with fame from a most unlikely source: a book of rhyming couplets about putting his young daughter to sleep that had improbably sold millions of copies and shot to the top of bestseller lists. Just as his dreams of writing success were coming true - interviews on late-night and morning shows, standing-room only events, an audiobook read by Samuel L. Jackson and Werner Herzog (not all dreams make sense) - he received a call from his father, with news about his older brother, David. 'my father said David has taken his own life and I answered as if I didn't understand or hadn't heard. My reply was what? And he repeated it. There is plenty to regret and perhaps this is insignificant but I wish I had not made him say it to me twice.' This epic poem tells the story of a young man grappling with the death of his beloved and troubled older brother - but more than that, trying to understand the nature of love, family, and mortality itself. In his Go the Fuck to Sleep, Mansbach deftly captured for millions of readers the comic tension between the love we have for our newborn children and the ways they drive us crazy; here, he uses that same sensitivity and ability to find a fresh language for common human experience to illuminate the search for meaning within grief at the other end of life. Mansbach finds himself facing a sudden void where once he brother stood without any way to make sense of the loss. This poem turns into his ritual of grief, his way of redeeming and understanding loss - and moving on"-- Provided by publisher.