Come! Come! Where? Where?

Essays

James Seay

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9781469678146, 9781469678139
• eBook ISBN: 9781469678153
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Literature

James Seay’s essays reflect a poet’s eye for detail and a seeker’s wrestling with life’s big questions and experiences: what it means to be a parent, losing a child, confronting mental illness, observing and living through the collision of cultures, finding the universal in the particularity of every day. We share moments with Seay that stay with us, dipping in and out of his life and our own collective experience, as he reflects on childhood memories of his grandmother wringing chicken necks for Sunday dinner, reads his way through Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha, processes 9/11, watches The Sopranos, and ponders the American obsession with guns. These essays transport readers—from the South to the Southwest, from the former Soviet Union to France, and beyond—while exploring disparate topics, often using literature as a means of understanding culture and place.

Seay offers few easy answers for the big questions he explores. But walking with him on his journeys will open eyes to the possibilities, tenderness, and mysteries that surround us, hidden among everyday things.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Down among the Bones, the Darks, the Sparrows
• Wheat Field with Crows
• The Weight of a Feather
• Through the Trees
• Our Hands in the History of It
• Avian Voices: Trying Not to Kill a Mockingbird
• Snugfit Eye Patch: The Monocular Proof
• You Dumb Bell
• Where Books Fall Open
• A Relative of Chekhov, a Cousin of Chaliapin
• Heroes
• Damn You, Love
• One Corner of Yoknapatawpha
• Big Boss Man
• The Chandeliers
• The Single-Wide Wars
• Dogs with Agency
• The Adjustment of Claims
• Ghost Beads
• Bathing the Buddha Man
• Acknowledgments