Field’s frequently shifting scenes evoke Alice Notley, Anne Carson, and James Joyce.

Publishers Weekly

Thalia Field

Thalia Field was born in Chicago in 1966. She attended a lycée in France, and worked at the Theatre des Amandiers in Nanterre and at the Theatre Nationale de Marseilles. She graduated with honors in creative writing from Brown University, winning the first John Hawkes prize in fiction. Two years ago she appeared with Suzan-Lori Parks at the Brooklyn Academy of Music dialogues series on poetry and theater, curated by Mac Wellman. Her teaching includes: Teachers & Writers Collaborative, Theater for a New Audience, and The Institute for Writing and Thinking at Bard. She has taught creative writing as a visiting professor at Brown, Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, and is presently on the faculty at Brown University, Providence, RI.

cover image of the book Personhood

Personhood

Whether investigating refugee parrots, indentured elephants, the pathetic fallacy, or the revolving absurdity of the human role in the “invasive species crisis,” Personhood reveals how the unmistakable problem between humans and our nonhuman relatives is too often the derangement of our narratives and the resulting lack of situational awareness. Building on her previous collection, Bird Lovers, Backyard, Thalia Field’s essayistic investigations invite us on a humorous, heartbroken journey into how people attempt to control the fragile complexities of a shared planet. The lived experiences of animals, and other historical actors, provide unique literary-ecological responses to the exigencies of injustice and to our delusions of special status.

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cover image of the book Bird Lovers, Backyard

Bird Lovers, Backyard

Bird Lovers, Backyard continues Thalia Field’s interrogation of the act of storytelling and her experimentation with literary genre. Field’s illuminating essays, or stories, in poetic form, place scientists, philosophers, animals, even the military, in real and imagined events. Her open questioning brings in subjects as diverse as pigeons, chat rooms, nuclear testing, the building of the Kennedy Space Center, the development of seaside beaches, Konrad Lorenz, the American author and animal trainer Vicki Hearne, and the Swiss zoologist Heini Hediger. Throughout, she intermingles fact and fiction, probing the porous boundaries between human and animal, calling into question “what we are willing to do with words,” and spinning a world where life is haunted by echoes. Story and event survive through daring language, and the elegies of history.

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cover image of the book Incarnate: Story Material

Incarnate: Story Material

Thalia Field’s new book explores the very condition of being incarnate: how, invested with human form, we experience both suffering and ecstasy from childhood to adulthood to death. As with her previous book Point and Line (2000), Incarnate defies categorization: written in a variety of poetic and prose-like forms, it “industriously works the sparsely populated and as yet underdeveloped borderlands between poetry, fiction, theater” (Review of Contemporary Fiction). As Carole Maso says in the American Book Review, Thalia Field is “playful, subversive, and intense.” In Incarnate: Story Material, she continues to reach beyond borders, examining how, trapped in our own stories, we act and react in a world we make solid, perceiving something “other” close at hand.

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cover image of the book Point And Line

Point And Line

The writings in Thalia Field’s long-awaited new book, Point and Line, wonderfully defy categorization. Perhaps describable as “epic poetries,” they represent a confluence of genres (fiction, theater, and poetry) in which Thalia Field has been involved over the course of her career. Written from a constructivist, post-genre sensibility, eluding classification, Field’s work presents her concerns with clarity in a world that resists it. Some pieces use generative schemes, portraits of mental shapes, which create meaning out of noise. In “Hours” and “Setting, the Table,” Field uses indeterminate performance techniques to emphasize the categorical/conceptual nature of thought. Visually, each chapter is captivating, showing both the author’s need for shapes and colors in her work, and her fascination with the contours of speech.

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Field’s frequently shifting scenes evoke Alice Notley, Anne Carson, and James Joyce.

Publishers Weekly

Between the inward tension of the point and the outward push of the line, Thalia Field maps a force field of relations, power games, shifting configurations, in a language both cool and intense, and with a surveyor’s precision.

Rosmarie Waldrop

Thalia Field’s curiosity and probe are infectious, tantalizing, irrepressible.

Anne Waldman

Between the inward tension of the point and the outward push of the line, Thalia Field maps a force field of relations, power games, shifting configurations. In a language both cool and intense, and with a surveyor’s precision. But for all the geometries, we are irresistibly pulled towards the center, the emotion which cannot be stated or described, only surrounded, so that the real story happens in the consciousness of the reader.

Rosmarie Waldrop
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