Contents:
As she discovers beauty in what is broken, her text proceeds in pieces: clippings from newspapers and government reports, bits of legislation, quotes from old poets and pieces of her own poetry, dialogue and letters, time-stamped journal entries and field reports. She proceeds to the American Southwest to study prairie dogs, and continues on to Rwanda to help build a genocide memorial.
We are both tied to community. We both seek time above- and belowground. And we are both struggling with how to survive in a world we hardly recognize. For all its stillness and the vast expanse of silence, this is tortured terrain. Rather, it collapses like a Mad fold-in , past mingling with present, underground and above at the same time.
In Italy, she makes mosaics in the method used for ages, looking up at the work of her predecessors. During her trip to Rwanda, which takes up the bulk of the book, genocide disrupts time — the brutal past is always present, in memories and memorials, in the ongoing violence , in churches heaped with bones and covered with bloodstains. This is where she seems to find the world most strange and beautiful: where an incomprehensible crime occurred, but where joy is still possible.
It is not my wrist that bleeds, but my words. Her beloved brother, Steven, died.
She watched damage to the western landscape particularly Utah and Wyoming increase violently and exponentially. She fought for parts of that environment and got, for her efforts, front row seats to the Greed and Power Show. These things dropped like boulders into her cup and caused it to spill over. Williams went to Ravenna, Italy, to apprentice in a mosaic workshop.
She has no belief in invention or innovation. In Italy, Utah and Africa, she tries to expand her ability to understand the fragmented world. She tries to make a mosaic of it in her mind and on the page. The tools are difficult to master: humility, eloquence, dignity, grace. You can feel will in there too -- the raw effort to insist on beauty, even as others try to destroy it.
The book requires some effort, yes. The mind is not always ready to connect pieces for itself, especially in a world that is more than happy to make connections for you. It is too much, at least for Williams, to make a cozy narrative, a story out of what she sees.
Reporting the world in fragments through the eyes of suffering animals and humans seems more honest. It is more personal and more respectful -- or selfless. Only Williams could place these tiles before us, gently, not aggressively, and ask us to connect them in our own ways.
Williams adopted a son from Rwanda, a young man named Louis who came to Salt Lake City to live with the author and her husband and attend college. I am learning.