about is/was
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Set in the media-saturated 1980s, when images of missing children first occupied the public imagination, is/was explores one town’s complex emotional reaction to the brutal rape and murder of a child within its bounds.
It is October 1983 and eight-year-old Abigail Wren has gone missing from a tiny Ontario town. In the crosscuts and fragments of each day’s news, word of the abduction filters into the troubled Fitch family household. Roland Fitch becomes unhinged by long kept secrets, while his wife Eva, turns inwards, tracing the aftermath of her own surgically precise loss. In the days and weeks following Abigail Wren’s death, the Fitch children, Andrew and Isabel, are increasingly left to parent themselves. As the already tenuous boundaries between family members are slowly effaced, once solid definitions – of the child, the adult, and the body – come unmoored. |
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| At its core, is/was is an unflinching meditation set at the very edge of human limits. Boundaries of language, media, and the body itself transform to hold the complex currents of lust and absence. This investigative first novel is never reductive, but with subtlety and nuance, unfolds the terrible trajectory of loss. |
Commentary on the text by Margaret Christakos
Jenny Sampirisi is a marvellous fiction writer and she is also a very good poet. Phrases like sump pump get repeated so we can hear the pleasured nuanced passage between the words sump and pump. The book is made of many chapters called "Files" and here we sense the interlinked simultaneity of "medical file," "photographic evidence," "police casework," "private diary," and experiences that quite literally wear us down.
Bookslut Reviews is/was
In a narrative of feeling and unfeeling, intrusive communication and unsaying, Sampirisi's language is composed of individual word-cells programmed to be and to perform; the author's grasp of the boundaries between is and was manifesting in a measured progression from living to doing.
Review by Erin McKnight
Globe and Mail Reviews is/was
Interview at Critical Crushes
Jenny Sampirisi has given an interview with Nathaniel G. Moore over at Critical Crushes. Check it out!
