Bøger af Gayle Brandeis

Oranges helped create the Golden Dream of Southern California from the time Eliza and Luther Tibbetts planted two Washington Navel Oranges in their Riverside yard in 1873. Over a century later, Inlandia Literary Laureate Gayle Brandeis has assembled a juicy collection of poetry, prose and recipes that explore, celebrate and memorialize our region's powerful citrus heritage. Together, these voices create a chorus singing of sweetness and loss, deep roots and seismic change. You will never look at an orange the same way again. Take a bite of Orangelandia!

In Drawing/Breath: Inhales and Exhales on Body and Word, PEN/Bellwether Prize-winning writer Gayle Brandeis' essays explore both the writing life and the embodied life, along with potent intersection between the two. From the title essay investigating the connection between writing and breath to the final essay, which delves into Brandeis' experience with long-haul Covid and its impact on her creative voice, this collection is infused with the urgency of mortality, thrumming with grief, authenticity, and a deep love for both language and the world of the senses.

Praised by US Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera as "a monumental achievement", The Selfless Bliss of The Body is award-winning novelist Gayle Brandeis' first full-length poetry collection. Poems from the book have been honored by the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Competition and the US Department of the Interior, which installed one of the poems at the Visitor Center in Joshua Tree National Park. These poems reach deeply into the body to reach beyond the body; Fresno Poet Laureate Lee Herrick writes "These tender and fierce poems are breathtaking gifts from a writer whose love for the world knows no bounds."

Ava Sing Lo has been accidentally killing her mother's birds since she was a little girl. Now in her twenties, Ava leaves her native San Diego for the Salton Sea, where she volunteers to help environmental activists save thousands of birds poisoned by agricultural runoff.Helen, her mother, has been haunted by her past for decades. As a young girl in Korea, Helen was drawn into prostitution on a segregated American army base. Several brutal years passed before a young white American soldier married her and brought her to California. When she gave birth to a black baby, her new husband quickly abandoned her, and she was left to fend for herself and her daughter in a foreign country.With great beauty and lyricism, The Book of Dead Birds captures a young woman's struggle to come to terms with her mother's terrible past while she searches for her own place in the world.

"Although MANY RESTLESS CONCERNS illuminates the horror of absolute control over others, it also shines a beacon on the strength of women sharing their truths one by one, of spirits joining together to topple the seemingly untouchable. This work speaks to our own times, to our #metoo reckoning, to our power as survivors to take back our stories and reclaim the darkness. Oppression of any kind never holds, even if it takes the dead to bring it down. This book is a haunting, essential read for all uneasy souls."-Laraine Herring"'Just know we all have stories worth your time. Just know we're just starting to understand our own worth.' This is how Gayle Brandeis opens MANY RESTLESS CONCERNS. Countess Bathory of Hungary allegedly killed up to 650 girls and women between the years 1585 and 1609, in a variety of cruel, heartless ways. Brandeis brings these words to our attention-stab, strangle, pummel, hack, burn, drown, freeze, scald. 'Your body remembers even when you no longer have a body, some tender part of you still flinches; some immaterial nerves still flare,' she writes. 'We want you to bear witness,' voices the chorus. I urge you, the reader, to bear witness to these centuries of silent voices rising up clearly, often beautifully, more often tragically. Bear witness."-Alma Luz Villanueva"Feels like a terrifying and gorgeously lyric fairy tale but never once does the author let us forget that the pain is real and the point is empathy, understanding and protecting the ones who come after. Ethereal and beautiful as its ghostly chorus, but with 'muscle and scent,' 'meat' and 'bone,' MANY RESTLESS CONCERNS is quickened with the blood of the victims, the essential, and ultimately healing, blood of story."-Francesca Lia Block"If all the women and girls who have been murdered, tortured, abused and disappeared were to raise their voices, they would create a song that would drown the world. In Gayle Brandeis' haunting and haunted novel-in-poems, MANY RESTLESS CONCERNS, she invokes such a chorus, the true story of hundreds of young women tortured to death by the Countess Bathory. Brandeis presents their gifts, their dreams, as well as the ways they died, and demonstrates that it is through collective action that they ultimately find justice. You will never un-hear their mournful, defiant and triumphal song."-Terry Wolverton"Gayle Brandeis is a miracle. From the forgotten memories of murdered women, she's created a monument of hope, pain, and demands for the justice of recognition. This is a startling, glorious, gorgeous book. What a vision. Read this book and be transformed."-Rene Denfeld

Get Your Creative Juices FlowingA sumptuous, sensuous writing guide from the author of the award-winning The Book of Dead Birds

Award-winning novelist and poet Gayle Brandeis's wrenching memoir of her complicated family history and her mother's suicideGayle Brandeis's mother disappeared just after Gayle gave birth to her youngest child. Several days later, her body was found: she had hanged herself in the utility closet of a Pasadena parking garage. In this searing, formally inventive memoir, Gayle describes the dissonance between being a new mother, a sweet-smelling infant at her chest, and a grieving daughter trying to piece together what happened, who her mother was, and all she had and hadn't understood about her.Around the time of her suicide, Gayle's mother had been working on a documentary about the rare illnesses she thought ravaged her family: porphyria and Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. In The Art of Misdiagnosis, taking its title from her mother's documentary, Gayle braids together her own narration of the charged weeks surrounding her mother's suicide, transcripts of her mother's documentary, research into delusional and factitious disorders, and Gayle's own experience with misdiagnosis and illness (both fabricated and real). Slowly and expertly, The Art of Misdiagnosis peels back the complicated layers of deception and complicity, of physical and mental illness in Gayle's family, to show how she and her mother had misdiagnosed one another.Gayle's memoir is both a compelling search into the mystery of one's own family and a life-affirming story of the relief discovered through breaking familial and personal silences. Written by a gifted stylist, The Art of Misdiagnosis delves into the tangled mysteries of disease, mental illness, and suicide and comes out the other side with grace.