Fluid States

Essays

Published by: Pleiades Press

108 Pages / 6.00 x 9.00 x 0.30 in

Paperback

9780807170595

Published: February 2019

$17.95

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Press Kit

A collection of lyric essays that considers the way subjects, stories, facts, and memories are as interconnected as streams in a watershed, Heidi Czerwiec’s Fluid States explores the interlocking issues created by the oilfields of North Dakota; the ephemerality of perfume, canning tomatoes, a fungus that infects and transforms mushrooms; and being the focus of internet hate. Short essays that present delightfully surprising facts with elegant and lyric language, her pieces all share underlying currents that question assumptions about gender, violence, reason, and intuition.

Heidi Czerwiec, author of Conjoining, is editor of North Dakota Is Everywhere: An Anthology of Contemporary North Dakota Poets. She holds an MFA from UNC-Greensboro and a PhD from the University of Utah. She was a professor for twelve years before moving to Minneapolis, where she is an editor for Poetry City, USA and Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, and mentors with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop.

Fluid States offers essays that are eclectic, unexpected, and entirely inventive. As the title suggests, the book flows briskly, a river infused with a keen intelligence and subtle wit, rendered in aromatic prose. One of the joys of reading is learning new details of our endlessly capacious world, and with her deeply-researched essays and enticing voice, Heidi Czerwiec delivers. ~Dinty W. Moore

On the surface, Fluid States perfumes pure sensory beauty. But linger for a bit, and you’ll hear the story the layers reveal: first the rush of seductive scent, then the music of a writer’s life, then the depth of a body politic. Here is the refrain: The oils of perfume. The perfumes of oil. These lyric essays envelop you in desire then root you in the musky tar of love. ~Nicole Walker

Fluid States is an apt title for a book that refuses to stay fixed. Czerwiec’s prose laps at our established genre lines, floods into the realm of poetry and ebbs back again. Whether she is immersed in the heady world of scent, or swimming in the personal effects of protest in this social media age, Czerwiec invites us to float with her toward a transformed horizon. ~Brenda Miller

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