The Beautiful Agonies

Adrie Kusserow is Professor of Anthropology at St. Michael's College and author of The Trauma Mantras, also published by Duke University Press, as well as Hunting Down the Monk, Refuge, and American Individualisms.

"Visceral, earthy, experience-driven, and nature-inspired prose that conjures the complex, divided emotions of reciprocity and presence in family caregiving from chronic illness through loss to mourning. Provocative, soul-searching, haunting. For such an existential condition, resonantly original!"--Arthur Kleinman, author of, The Soul of Care: The Moral Education of a Husband and a Doctor "The brilliance of Adrie Kusserow's poetic description is that it is a thing raised in a meadow of worldly thinking. Performances of form grope trees and traverse countertops. The bully of passing season doesn't quite give in to the next. A Lady's Slippers Orchid recalls a tone of voice. A flurry of righteous capitalist crows settle around a mind, squawking, mocking. A world reyolks in an explosion of tulips."--Kathleen C. Stewart, author of, Ordinary Affects "A stunningly original combination of memoir, anthropology, and Buddhist philosophy. With an unflinching eye, Adrie Kusserow examines the joys and agonies of accompanying her mother through the end of her life, creating a piercing, utterly moving portrait of grief and a refreshingly unromanticized view of a caretaker's experience."--Emma Bolden, author of, The Tiger and the Cage: A Memoir of a Body in Crisis "There is a great deal of heavy lifting going on in this creative writing, but it is against a backdrop--the seasons of the northeast mountains--that sometimes swell into the foreground, and that always offer a meaningful frame for what we all must encounter and endure. As a fellow Vermonter--and a fellow human being--I found great help in these words. This is potent and important."--Bill McKibben, author of, Wandering Home