Flutter Point: Essays

Flutter Point is a collection of essays that centers on humanness, rumination, and truth, and it was the winner of the 2015 Zone 3 Press Creative Nonfiction Book Award.   "Erik Anderson, in these very edgy essays of Flutter Point, mines the rich ore of the 'or,' back slashing, back and forth, through the porous membranes of punctuated category, the skeletal strata of this gelatinous and layered world. To 'decide' is to cut, to sever, and Anderson is a katana smith par excellence, folding fluid steel, folding it back on itself again and again, peening home the sudden stunning serration less, it seems, than a molecule thick, while still separating out those old infinite spaces between the stars and the anxious quantum angstroms buzzing at the center of our very beings." -- Michael Martone, author of Michael Martone and Winesburg, Indiana "Flutter Point's essays are palpably haunted by the past and future of our species and planet. But Anderson does something rare and even hopeful, even so: his ruminations pry apart our default intuitions about humanness and animality, the natural and built environments, art, language, and the body, and hold them apart like parentheses for us, to find a little space inside. In that space, these essays search for truthful, appropriate kinds of mourning and pleasure, presence and detachment. The brilliance of Flutter Point is that what results are fresh new forms of the essay—moving, intelligent, relentless, still, and made exactly for our time." -- Kristin Dombek, author of The Selfishness of Others: An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism   Erik Anderson is the author of three previous books of nonfiction: The Poetics of Trespass (2010), Estranger (2016), and Flutter Point: Essays (2017), selected by Amy Fusselman for the 2015 Zone 3 Nonfiction Book Prize. He teaches creative writing at Franklin & Marshall College, USA, and lives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.