Lost Wax
Essays
by Jericho Parms
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Pub Date Sep 15 2016 | Archive Date Oct 15 2016
Description
For her collection Lost Wax, Jericho Parms borrows her title from a casting method used by sculptors. As such, these eighteen essays, centered on art and memory, offer an investigation into form and content and the language of innocence, experience, and loss. Four sections (each borrowing names from the sculptures of Degas, Bernini, and Rodin) frame a series of meditations that consider the boundaries of the discernible world and the extremes of the body and the self. Here Parms draws heavily on memories of a Bronx upbringing in the 1980s and1990s; explorations in Spain, Portugal, Ireland, and the American West; the struggle to comprehend race, love, family, madness, and nostalgia; and the unending influence of art, poetry, and music.
Written largely within the galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Lost Wax is an inquiry into the ways we curate memory and human experience despite the limits of observation and language. In these essays, Parms exhibits and examines her greatest obsessions: how to describe the surface of marble or bronze; how to embrace the necessary complexities of identity, stillness and movement, life and death—how to be young and alive.
A Note From the Publisher
Advance Praise
“Lost Wax by Jericho Parms is an ekphrastic and lyrical meditation on love, loss, language, family, and identity. . . . As much a travel memoir as a collection of essays, the book ultimately enacts an essayistic and valiant attempt at self-understanding. . . . Lost Wax is a book about fitting in everywhere and nowhere, about living in between parents, between identities, between relationships, landscapes, past, present, and future. It becomes, in the end, a stunning celebration of the liminal spaces in life.”
—Steven Church, author of One with the Tiger: On Savagery and Intimacy
“The essays in Jericho Parms’s Lost Wax read exquisitely as
poems, each piece a lyrical moment resplendent with imagery. In a work
punctuated by art and music, and tinged with drama and heartache, Parms
retraces her steps through the family rooms of her youth, across the
galleries of adulthood, to create a portrait of a cultured life borne
out of curiosity and relentless wonder.”
—Rigoberto González, author of Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa
"In Lost Wax, Jericho Parms offers her readers an intricate map
of her coming of age. Loosely chronological and spanning Parms's early
life (in the 1980s and 1990s) to her adulthood in the present day, her
essays are surfaced, textured, raised, in relief. Home and away have
deeply marked her."
—Audrey Petty, editor of High Rise Stories: Voices from Chicago Public Housing
"The author offers beautiful reflections on memory, art, identity, and
living within the interstices of the world, and she provides many gems
of observation and expertly crafted metaphors and similes. Along the
way, Parms also injects the book with an array of arresting historical,
cultural, and aesthetic asides. As an artist and a person, what Parms
desires most of all is 'to soak everything in,' and as she does so, we
find her to be a perceptive, unsettling, and surprisingly endearing
guide."
—Kirkus Reviews
"Following the inspiration for this book’s title, the lost wax method
for making cast sculpture, the essays in Parms’s delicately molded
collection find their form and meaning through meditations on containers
and absence. She writes about journeys and distance, freedom and
captivity, the losses of pets and people, and 'how material textures
enclose our living impulses.' Parms’s prose is as elegant and studied as
the classical sculpture she admires, making wonderful leaps and
astonishing juxtapositions through which her precise, startling images
emerge like etchings on glass."
—Publishers Weekly
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9780820350158 |
| PRICE | $24.95 (USD) |
