Disaster

“Madison manages to seamlessly remove the site of disaster from history, to look at it from a multidimensional perspective where time is as material as flesh, is moved through, touched and affected by a witness, but also touches back, subtly or exponentially changing our course. We progress through the book as through a void where both of these feelings are weighted, drawing us to an undefined meeting place in the middle. As she notes in the collection’s afterword, ‘It is in that liminal space that I was caught while writing Disaster, and what I can tell you now is that I don’t feel like an only child in the world even though my sibling has died, and it has something to do with living in that space, with surviving there’ (65). Disaster provides continuity and connection through its bare survival in a space of uncertainty, drawing the reader into the perpetually active site of loss.”

“Examined together like this, these incidents compound, and observations transcend the details of each disaster; disaster itself becomes a phenomenon by which we might understand, and even predict, our own behaviors.”