Team photograph

Lauren Haldeman

Book - 2022

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BIOGRAPHY/Haldeman, Lauren
1 / 2 copies available
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2nd Floor BIOGRAPHY/Haldeman, Lauren Due Apr 9, 2024
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Subjects
Genres
Graphic novels
Autobiographies
Creative nonfiction
Poetry
Published
[Louisville, Kentucky] : [Sarabande Books] [2022]
Language
English
Main Author
Lauren Haldeman (author)
Item Description
"In her extraordinary graphic novel—which masterfully incorporates poetry and elements of memoir—Lauren Haldeman layers the warfare of soccer over the battlefields now called Bull Run Regional Park, where, growing up, her soccer team would practice and compete. The park and surrounding town of Fairfax Station Virginia set the landscape for the book, where the narrator regularly encounters spectral visions of wounded soldiers and very real artifacts of war— “wounded wraiths and faceless shapes” float in her hallway at night, and bullet shells, buttons, and human bones surface around the soccer fields in daylight. The narrator turns to poetry and history to make sense of the town and its bloodshed, of its forever attachment to injustice and its inability to restore erased identities. Team Photograph is a journey from research to illumination, and the result is a tender yet powerful reckoning of time and place, proof that the past and the present are inexorably fused together." --publisher
Physical Description
pages : illustrations ; cm
Issued also as an ebook
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN
9781956046007
Contents unavailable.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Poet Haldeman (Instead of Dying) blends verse, history, and memoir in this hypnotic meditation on the legacy of violence. Growing up in Fairfax Station, Va., Haldeman played soccer on the sites of Civil War battlefields, "a mess of woods and worlds" layered with memories of death, and was visited by ghosts in her childhood home. As an adult, she returns to delve into the history of the area and uncovers a complex landscape of war and slavery, with her take on the violence of the past sharpened by her grief over the 2012 murder of her brother. Haldeman's journey back and forth through time is depicted though comics in which the characters appear as anthropomorphic wolves (in honor of the animal her brother loved), but also interstitial sequences of poetry. Though she draws a connection between sports and warfare, it's ultimately the latter that carries the story, with soccer field boredom providing an entry point for ruminations on battles both literal and metaphorical. Haldeman's drawings are blocky, but her scenes are elegantly composed, playing with layouts and perspectives. This haunted and haunting work will linger in the minds of readers. (Nov.)

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