{ "item_title" : "Sinkhole", "item_author" : [" Juliet Patterson "], "item_description" : "Finalist for the 2023 Minnesota Book AwardA sublimely elegant, fractured reckoning with the legacy and inheritance of suicide in one American family.In 2009, Juliet Patterson was recovering from a serious car accident when she learned her father had died by suicide. His death was part of a disturbing pattern in her family. Her father's father had taken his own life; so had her mother's. Over the weeks and months that followed, grieving and in physical pain, Patterson kept returning to one question: Why? Why had her family lost so many men, so many fathers, and what lay beneath the silence that had taken hold?In three graceful movements, Patterson explores these questions. In the winter of her father's death, she struggles to make sense of the loss--sifting through the few belongings he left behind, looking to signs and symbols for meaning. As the spring thaw comes, she and her mother depart Minnesota for her father's burial in her parents' hometown of Pittsburg, Kansas. A once-prosperous town of promise and of violence, against people and the land, Pittsburg is now literally undermined by abandoned claims and sinkholes. There, Patterson carefully gathers evidence and radically imagines the final days of the grandfathers--one a fiery pro-labor politician, the other a melancholy businessman--she never knew. And finally, she returns to her father: to the haunting subjects of goodbyes, of loss, and of how to break the cycle.A stunning elegy that vividly enacts Emily Dickinson's dictum to tell it slant, Sinkhole richly layers personal, familial, political, and environmental histories to provide not answers but essential, heartbreaking truth.", "item_img_path" : "https://covers1.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/1/57/131/176/1571311769_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "25.00", "online_price" : "25.00", "our_price" : "25.00", "club_price" : "25.00", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "" } }

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Poet and author Juliet Patterson was in her 40s when her father, James, died by suicide. James was a child when his father, Edward, died by suicide. And Patterson's mother, Carolyn, was raising young children when her father, William, died by suicide. Patterson spent more than a decade trying to make sense of this family history, repeatedly visiting Pittsburg, Kansas, the city her father, Edward and William all called home. It's an old mining town with a surface pockmarked by sinkholes, scars of past industry that may have also left marks on the town's residents. As Patterson researched the men in her family tree and suicide itself, she wondered about the effect this wounded history could have had on her family. The result of this meticulous research and soul-searching is Sinkhole: A Natural History of Suicide. The memoir is at moments reminiscent of Terry Tempest Williams' Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place. Like Williams, Patterson surveys both the land around her and her inner emotional landscape. She searches for connections between the Industrial Revolution's effects on society and her family's repeated losses before ultimately recognizing that every tragedy stems from numerous influences. Patterson's poetic sensibility informs her prose as she weaves together ideas about family and research about land in a lyrical way. She's looking for answers in Sinkhole, but the path that leads to a suicide isn't linear. It's more akin to a sinkhole, Patterson writes, spreading and consuming everything around it.