Bright Archive

In Sarah Minor's adventurous and investigatory debut collection of essays, BRIGHT ARCHIVE, place and space are inextricably linked through an imaginative exploration of the patterns, shapes, and systems that alternately organize and disrupt our ordinary intimacies. From a recollection of a summer spent working in an Italian commune to the business of mollusks in Minor's grandparents' hometown in Iowa; from the history of the mapping of the Mississippi River to the mythologies of the image of "the lean;" from studies of soffits and hidden spaces to the freedom found at the top of an island birch tree, these essays reach beyond the classically confined trajectories of literary nonfiction. Using elements of memoir, concrete poetry, archival research, interview, performance, and design in a radiant kaleidoscope of storytelling, the essays in BRIGHT ARCHIVE delight in challenging the reader's habits of interaction with the page and its possibilities.   Sarah Minor is a writer and interdisciplinary artist and the author of Slim Confessions: The Universe as a Spider or Spit, winner of the Noemi Press Book Award for Prose (2021), Bright Archive, a collection of visual essays (Rescue Press, 2020), and the chapbook The Persistence of The Bonyleg: Annotated, selected by Joseph Harrington (Essay Press, 2016). Minor serves as curator of the visual essay series at Essay Daily and as the Video Essay and Cinepoetry Section Editor at TriQuarterly Review. She holds a PhD from Ohio University, an MFA from the University of Arizona, and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Iowa.   "Sarah Minor's sense of what an essay is, what it can look like, and what it can contain is way beyond what almost anyone else is even attempting. Open to any page in this book and you're going to encounter something new." - Ander Monson "In BRIGHT ARCHIVE, Sarah Minor's inventive, surprising, and moving collection of visual essays, short prose pieces nestle in the soffits of an old family home, sentences wind themselves into knots, passages draft alongside the banks of the Mississippi River-as a way of interrogating the relationships between and among literal, figurative, and symbolic spaces. Minor is preoccupied with interiors and exteriors, bodies and imaginations, myths and secrets, with how places are entered and marked by their inhabitants, and how people, too are shaped. 'All I'm saying is that belief might design a body and not always the other way around. All I'm saying is that a living container could bear signs of the life it contains.' In this thrilling debut, Minor guides us deftly through the underground tunnels of a new age commune, to the branches of a birch tree to build a nest. This collection traverses continents and moves through time, insistent in its curiosity and dazzling in its innovation." - Mary-Kim Arnold "My favorite books are somehow architectural, and I've never encountered one built quite like this. Minor's prose has underground temples, a shadow self, it becomes the thing it describes. Prose morphing into pearls, rivers down the page, a diagram directs the eye, cupping an essay's threads. This is a book that, through both story and design, reminds us what wonder feels like." - Aisha Sabatini Sloan "Minor is a formidable essayist whose contributions to nonfiction are not limited to formal innovation. Bright Archive also interrogates questions of sexuality, refuge, and familial legacy.." - Zoë Bossiere "A combination of concrete poetry, interviews, memoir, and historical research, Minor's experimental nonfiction collection is interactive architecture with directional force. Each essay demands the reader physically change perspectives to enter figurative and literal interstices that examine how people and places are shaped by one another." - Tree Abraham