Watchfires

Literary Nonfiction. Fiction. Hilary Plums WATCHFIRES is an intimate account of public and private life during the long years of the "war on terror." This remarkable essay begins in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing and illuminates the relationships among cancer autoimmune disease the Iraq War the Arab Spring Occupy veteran suicide the American epidemic of gun violence and Plums family history. The result is an urgent inquiryphilosophical political and personalinto the maladies of our age. "Hilary Plums memoir WATCHFIRES is a tender twisted darkly vibrant meditation on the war on terror as autoimmune disease. A quiet work of genius as hopeful in its punishing honesty as it is rueful in its dire beauty WATCHFIRES warns remembers regrets recovers. Plum can taste our febrile paranoia and writes it inside out."Roy Scranton "Hilary Plums WATCHFIRES derives its title from the military practice of lighting a large fire after a battle to help those lost to locate the group. How apt given how lost we are. Composed of paragraph pyres WATCHFIRES illuminates the illness of our bodies and our body politic. In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing and of the private illnesses that the author and her family have endured WATCHFIRES poses poignant and essential questions about our age: where does the self begin and end? Who is the other if not my own (other-abled) body? Is terrorism a political act or a cancer? In the tradition of Virginia Woolf Susan Sontag Simone Weil and William Stafford Plum shores these half-fictive all-true fragments against the ruins of our humanity lost islands in the age of terrorism and autoimmunity."Philip Metres "Hilary Plum is a remarkably natural essayist and WATCHFIRES is teeming with wisdom depth and ache. Flitting among a half-dozen topics with organic ease and wonder Plums work is oblique but always precise personal and utterly controlledimagine what Virginia Woolf might have written if shed been intimately familiar with the Boston Marathon bombing having a partner suffering from cancer and the forever wars. If theres any justice in the reading world this book will be read broadly and passed between admirers for decades to come."Daniel Torday