After the tragic loss of her son, Abby attempts to escape her grief by taking to the open road, only to find herself in Central Mexico in a hotel that’s home to other lost souls.
It’s the late nineties, when it is still possible to disappear, and Abby is at an impasse between self-destruction and dissolution. Just months after the death of her son, in a last-ditch effort to escape her reality, Abby buys a $500 car, tucks a buck knife in her glove box, and makes one impulsive move: she takes an exit south and keeps driving. It’s in a small town in central Mexico that Abby’s physical journey comes to an end, and it’s there amongst other outcasts and expats that Abby might finally choose to see beyond her own grief.

Catherine Black is Associate Professor and Chair of the Creative Writing BFA program at OCAD University. Catherine’s first collection of prose poetry Lessons of Chaos and Disaster was the second book in Guernica Edition’s “First Poets Series,” and her lyric nonfiction novella A Hard Gold Thread (Guernica, 2011) was nominated for the ReLit award. Her third book, Bewilderness, was nominated for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. Broadly speaking, Catherine’s areas of interest and expertise in creative writing include experimentations in prose poetry and other hybrid forms such as the lyric essay and longer experimental fiction. Thematically, her work interrogates the reliability of memory, the intersections of imagination and reality, as well as issues of motherhood, ‘madness,’ and the dissociative aspects of grief and trauma. Catherine has recently begun to explore ways in which her writing might span media, through guerrilla poetry projects and the creation of literary objects.

Catherine Black's profile page

• Winner, Guernica Prize

This is a novel rich with life and empathy in a sea of grief. One of the most beautiful books I have read.

Nazanine Hozar, Guernica Prize judge