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The Book of Kin: On Absence, Love, and Being There Audiobook
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A remarkable debut that explores the imperfect ways we care for one another and how we seek repair when care fails.
“What is our obligation to each other?” asks Jennifer Eli Bowen in this propulsive exploration of community, solitude, and love. Drawing on her experiences as a mother, daughter, and founder of the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, the country’s largest and most enduring prison-based literary organization, she examines the wild spectrum of shapes that care can take. She investigates the role of community across the world and in her own neighborhood, driven by a curiosity to uncover what might be gleaned from various vanishments in her own life: the shadow of her father, disappeared backyard chickens, a Moleskine notebook that passes in and out of her Little Free Library.
Tracing both connection and its lack, Bowen uncovers what happens when it’s missing, how we find it, and how it heals individuals, communities, and systems—from the incarcerated caretakers of newborn foals in Norway to the time-bending drama of watching children grow into adults. And through this winding quest to understand love, she moves readers out of their complacency not only about the state of American incarceration but about what we owe ourselves and society.
Unflinching, vulnerable, and surprisingly funny, The Book of Kin encourages us not to abandon each other, reminding us that “harm is shared, and healing is too.”
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"“Written with a lyric eye, a probing mind, and an enormous heart, this extraordinary book of essays is both a search and an arrival—a quest into the heart of what it means, and requires, to live alongside one another.”"
— Lauren Markham, author of The Far Away Brothers
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“A must-read for anyone asking how we can best find community with those around us, from our families to those imprisoned half a world away.”
— Laura Leigh Morris, author of The Stone Catchers -
“More than a meditation, this is a loving expression of one woman’s labor to find clarity alongside us and even on behalf of us.”
— Lama Rod Owens, author of The New Saints -
“Reminds us of the true root of the word compassion: the rare, yet transcendent ability to hold both tenderness and sorrow, simultaneously."
— Inara Verzemnieks, author of Among the Living and the Dead -
“An expansive experience, one that, I believe, will be appreciated for its searing and always-seeking approach to tackling large emotions, to wringing the secondary colors out of the grander, primary feelings.”
— Hanif Abdurraqib, author of There’s Always This Year
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About Jennifer Eli Bowen
Jennifer Eli Bowen is a writer, arts instructor, and editor. Her work has received a Pushcart Prize, the Arts and Letters Prize, and the Tim McGinnis Award, and her writing has appeared in The Sun magazine, the Iowa Review, Orion, and Kenyon Review. She is the founder of the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop.
About Erin Bennett
Erin Bennett is an Earphones Award–winning narrator and a stage actress who played Carlie Roberts in the BBC radio drama Torchwood: Submission. She can be heard on several video games. Regional theater appearances include the Intiman, Pasadena Playhouse, Arizona Theatre Company, A Noise Within, Laguna Playhouse, and the Getty Villa. She trained at Boston University and the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.